The Ohioans

I.

THE land of the Ohioans had anciently its foundation in the deep sea. Little by little the waters withdrew to the Mexican Gulf, and a measureless sheet of clear ice covered the face of the earth. The ice, melting in the sunshine, slowly passed away; and then there were forests of the evergreen, where savage men, brothers to mastodon and megalonyx, roamed as they would, disposing in many a watered valley their ten thousand fantastic earthworks. Then came Indians, and after the Indians the French, and after the French the English, each claiming freehold, and each in turn displaced, till at last, with no little rumble of wagon wheels and no uncertain sound of ringing axe, came the American citizen, who grubbed up roots, chopped down trees, built a rude cabin of buckeye logs, and set about getting himself elected President of the United States.

Sitting at luncheon one day in a rude log cabin (such antiquities abound in Ohio), Helen looked out through the open doorway, whose lintel still showed marks of the pioneersman’s axe, and spied a passing train of flat cars laden with modern steam threshers, electric motors, and newly varnished trolley trams. “Look!” she cried. “From where we sit you can see the whole material evolution of Ohio.”

Now when I think of the industrial history of the Ohioans, I ask myself two questions : What kind of man came first to conquer that wilderness ? What kind of wilderness had that man to conquer ?

The kind of man was a miracle of rugged hardihood, — virile, enduring, belligerent. Think of his record in battles ! 1812 put every able-bodied Ohioan in the field. The state sent more troops to Mexico than any other northern commonwealth. “ Ohio ” is written all over the national cemetery at Chickamauga. Once the Buckeyes disputed the Michigan boundary, and flung an army upon the frontier. In this recent Cuban business men fought with one another like jungle beasts for place in the ranks. Nine tenths of the Ohioans are for holding the Philippine Islands. Such men as these loved a fight with the forest ; men of lesser fortitude would never have pioneered. Then, with how brilliant a dramatis personae that age-long play began !

There was first an era of falling trees. Settlers, clad in linsey shirts and buckskin trousers, tracked the wild turkey, shot the deer, picked off the squirrel from the tallest oak, or toiled all day among stubborn roots, and made merry by night in log huts while wolves howled at the door. Meantime their wives made moan with honest Touchstone: “ Ay, now am I in Arden ; the more fool I; when I was at home, I was in a better place: but travellers must be content.”

Then the kind of land rewarded the kind of man. There followed an epoch of growing crops. Corn stood glistening on the red “ bottoms,” wheat waved in the continual strong winds, vast fields were brown with the bearded barley. For many and many a mile through the north the whole countryside was made a vineyard, and is so now, where Catawba wine, Niagara, and Angelica are sold for a ditty (to the no small demoralization of the northern farmer). Immense flocks of sheep increased and multiplied. All sorts of fruits and garden produce bore witness to the exuberant fertility of the soil. The Buckeye State was suddenly so filled with good things to eat that there were not months enough to eat them.

Ohio must therefore shoulder its wares and get to market; but how ? There was not a good road in the land. There goes a legend that the Ohioans turned out gangs of convicts to build them highways. I believe the legend : only criminals— indeed, I may say only instinctive criminals or confirmed recidivists — could have constructed such roads as still disgrace that splendid state. Moreover, Ohio mapped its roads by the a priori method, regardless of hill or dale ; consequently, as the country, though level in general, is extremely hilly in particular, you climb up the face of Nature.

Canals, coming later, served a better purpose. For a time they enriched the people : and now, when fallen much into decline, owing to the prosperity of railways, they contribute both humor and picturesqueness. “ The way for a canal to declare a dividend,” say the Ohioans, “ is to mow the towpath and divide the grass.” Here and there we saw canals lapsed utterly into disuse, — the towpath sliding into the water, bridges in ruins, and the murky channel covered with lily pads, cat-tails, and sagittaria, a happy home for bullfrogs and the skimming dragon flies. Yet think what those same canals once did for Ohio! They advanced the price of farm labor one half ; they blazed a path for progress ; they ushered in a marvelous prosperity, fully evidenced to-day by the innumerable handsome farmsteads, the large fields, the well-kept hedges, the windmills to fetch water, frequent threehorse teams of heavy Percherons, a telephone in nearly every farmhouse. Seventy-five years have passed since Lafayette called Ohio “the eighth wonder of the world.” Canals had made it so.

Then, upon land and river and inland sea, followed a yet more magnificent evolution. Railroads wove an iron web across the state, doubling the price of flour, trebling that of wheat, quadrupling that of corn. On Lake Erie the tiny Walk-in-the-Water led forth a fleet of steamboats, in whose wake came the ungainly old-time “ propeller,” — with green hull, a row of schooner-rigged masts, and twin smokestacks far astern, — making way for as superb a line of steamships as ever parted the brine of the Atlantic. Ocean greyhounds they are, though they cruise in fresh water. When I behold those graceful vessels — all snowy white without, all a-shimmer with gold leaf and plate glass within, and belching smoke from three yellow funnels — I am inwardly an admiral. And while the lakes linked Cleveland, Sandusky, Toledo, and Lorain to the great chain of ports that stretches from Duluth to Buffalo, the Beautiful River led the way to New Orleans and the sea. Yet how different the shuttles that go flying to and fro in that loom of the lovely South ! Take an antiquated summer hotel, brave in piazzas and sparing of paint ; set it afloat on a gigantic tea tray ; give it a monstrous squirrel cage by way of water wheel at its latter end ; add a pair of slender black chimneys, one at either side and fairly well forward ; load the deck with agricultural machinery, oil derricks in sections, garden produce, and baled hay ; pile sacks of flour in the cabin ; post a man in the bow to pour a bucket of water on the pebbles to float the craft where the stream is shallow ; and you have — an Ohio River steamboat.

If now the soil of Ohio made good its promise of fertility, if too Ohio were got to market, was that to be the sole reward for the men who waged war with the forest? By no means. For underneath that soil lay buried such riches as not even Lafayette would have dared foretell.

The Buckeye State is modeled in clay. Zanesville they call the Clay City. Cincinnati is famous for artistic potteries. The State University boasts a School of Ceramics. The Ohioans rank first as makers of bricks and tile. They also rank first as cutters of stone. In the grand vestibule of the museum at Columbus you will see twenty-four pillars, every one carved from a different kind of native rock. Moreover, there are wells of salt that give Ohio third place among the salt-producing states. Furthermore, oil abounds : whole counties are covered with derricks. At Sistersville they smell oil, taste oil, eat oil. And along with oil goes natural gas, flaming by night in wind-blown torches twenty feet high. Coal, the logical premise of natural gas, covers enormous areas. Only Pennsylvania digs out more bituminous coal than Ohio. In the southeast they build railway roadbeds of coal, sometimes even making whole embankments of coal, while black dumps of coal pour from countless mysterious punctures in the hillside. And to him that hath shall be given. Ohio, already rich in raw materials, and commanding unrivaled facilities for carrying those materials from place to place, perceived the advantages of its location at the gateway of the middle West, and, adding industry to industry, became one vast resounding workshop.

By combining coal and ore in a furnace and roasting them together, men transmute iron through steel to gold. Given the inexhaustible mineral deposits of Lake Superior and the inexhaustible coal measures of Southeastern Ohio, the problem was where to light up the fire. “ Cleveland,” said the Ohioans, and forthwith did the thing. So Cleveland becomes at once a long-distance mining camp, a long-range coal pit, and a gigantic smithy, where ore is heaped in brown hillocks and coal piled up by millions of tons. It leaves a confused impression of ringing hammers, the heavy smell of the moulding room, the swing of cranes, the hot breath of furnaces, the red gush of molten metal,—sensations vivid, extreme, bizarre. Here they are turning out agricultural implements; yonder a horse goes round a windlass, drawing an immense scarlet boiler through the street; and see! by the bank of the yellow Cuyahoga they are launching a great steel ship, — launching her sidewise, — and the splash goes up like the surf in a hurricane.

Or approach the city from the lake. It is first a long, brown cloud ; then a score of dim smokestacks appear ; then a spire, then more spires ; then the sunlit face of a tall building ; then the sun is obscured (you are entering into the gloom), and, borrowing Whistler’s phrase, you call that city “ an arrangement in black.” And now, I beg you, take a look at yourself ! You have a mezzotint collar, and your finger nails are reduced to half mourning. As for your trachea, bronchi, and bronchial tubes, there is work for the chimney sweep down there. “ But why, pray,” you ask, " do Clevelanders suffer such breach of the smoke law ? ” “ My dear fellow,” they answer, “ if we want factories to come here, we mustn’t be too stringent.” So Clevelanders smile and endure : smoke means business, business means money, and money is the principal thing. Cleveland is therefore a city of laundries. So is Cincinnati.

It was upon some such murky vista as this that Helen’s fancy looked out, as she viewed that trainload of modernity from the old log cabin. The Ohioans, impressed with the panoramic splendor of their advancement, feel a similar poetic delight. “ Think ! ” they say. “ A hundred and fifty years ago, and this was the wilderness ; a hundred years ago, the frontier ; fifty years ago, a half-developed farm land. Now, before the stumps are out of the ground, we are cheering for forest preservation ; before our cities have fully come to civic self-consciousness, they teem with their hundreds of thousands. Already our state is the great garden, the great workshop, the great schoolhouse, the great council chamber, for half America. Ourselves a nation, we could put a wall around Ohio and live! ”

Dazed with the solid fulfillment of the wildest predictions, the mind runs out into monstrous exaggerations. Every town is half again as large as itself, every trade more prosperous than statistics admit, every institution an infinitude of the sublime. Ohioans measure Ohio as they measure the huge mastodon, — “ Twenty feet from the tip of his tusk to the tip of his tail, twenty feet from the tip of his tail to the tip of his tusk, making in all the enormous length of forty feet! ” Brag leaps all bounds ; the brain reels with superlatives. Ohio is first, best, biggest. Artemus Ward was never so faithful a Buckeye as when he said, “ Where, oh where, can my little kangaroo be ekalled ? I answer nowheres — nor anywheres else ! ”

II.

Ohio was long a mere social and civic Vagabondia; but the beginning of this century beheld an inpouring of homeseekers from the far corners of the realm. What with Jerseymen settling Symmes’s Purchase, Connecticut farmers flocking into the Western Reserve, pioneers from Massachusetts taking up the lands of the Ohio Company, Pennsylvanians developing the Seven Ranges, men from Norfolk and Richmond peopling the Virginia Military District, while a nondescript populace assembled in the United States Military Reserve, the resultant commonwealth still shows more or less distinct traces of its varied lineage. Ohio herein resembles our faithful Cerberus. “ Mercy me ! ” cried Helen, when first I dragged him home. “ Oh, mercy on us ! What kinds of dog are he ? ”

Gradually, however, the Ohioans are reducing themselves to their lowest terms. Time, the mixture of newcomers, intermarriage, and the welding consequent upon warfare have so modified original conditions that the main fact begins to stand out bold and strong: in the northern part of Ohio you feel the influence of New England ; elsewhere you feel the influence of the South. The Ohioans are the United States in vertical section.

Were I to drop, like Cyrano, from the moon, and to land, unlike Cyrano, in Painesville, Ohio, I should immediately inquire for the Boston and Albany station. There are the same drooping elms, the same pilastered houses,the same Common, the same noble churches, as in lovely Massachusetts. Lake Erie College in Painesville is a lineal descendant of Mount Holyoke. Or what of Oberlin ? If Painesville suggests, Oberlin fulfills and verifies. For was not Oberlin, like Plymouth, founded for conscience’ sake ? Early Oberlin signed a covenant. “ Lamenting the degeneracy of the church and the deplorable condition of our perishing world,” Oberlin would “eat only plain and wholesome food ; ” renounce “ all bad habits, especially the smoking and chewing of tobacco;” deny itself “all strong and unnecessary drinks, even tea and coffee, and everything expensive that is simply calculated to gratify appetite and forswear “ all the world’s expensive and unwholesome fashions of dress, particularly tight lacing and ornamental attire.” And although the covenant is no more, public sentiment still enforces a code of astonishing blue laws. Apothecaries, fearing boycott, sell no cigars. Amble through Oberlin fondling a meerschaum, and the burghers glower as if they would come upon you to eat up your flesh. As local option obtains in Ohio, Oberlin is surrounded by a great American desert, sixteen miles one way and twentyseven the other, — an epitomized state of Maine, only more so. There has never yet been a dancing party in Oberlin. Theatrical folk walk wide of the place. Here, say I, is the Puritan regimen of Massachusetts and Connecticut, condensed and exaggerated. In what other part of the country save in antique New England could you have brewed such strenuous leaven, and where else in Ohio save in the Western Reserve could you have found room to hide it ?

Northern Ohio, like New England, gave lodgment to early abolitionism. Ex-President Fairchild, the most picturesque figure in Ohio, loves to tell how Oberlin helped forge that slenderest, though strongest, link in the Federal chain. During the winter vacation, when Oberlin students dispersed through Ohio to teach school, they carried with them their gospel of emancipation. But for their labors, who knows but Ohio might have gone with the South, and severed the line of Union states ?

New England is another name for conscience, and conscience is a kind of immovable habit. So the Western Reserve, which reflects New England, is profoundly conservative, particularly in commercial affairs. Judge a city by its banks, and Cleveland looms up like the rock of Gibraltar: in the crisis of 1893 not one bank in the city closed its doors. Judge it by its material progress, and you find that, though the population has mounted in half a century from twenty thousand to four hundred thousand, the city has never been boomed. Judge it by its mercantile buildings, — the sky-scraper is a late arrival. Prudence, then, is the watchword of the Western Reserve, — prudence and caution. In Geauga County the farmers count their bees every night. Yet the clocks of Ohio, rather than its banks or its bees, best illustrate its conservatism. When there went forth an edict to set all clocks by standard time, fully half the Ohioans revolted. Result ? Three different kinds of time in Ohio! There is “ central time,” which is standard time ; “eastern time,” the time of Washington, in use on the Ohio River steamboats ; and “ sun time.” Church services begin at a quarter past ten ; luncheon is served at half past eleven; shops open at seven. The times are out of joint, and the Ohioans with them.

With what a delightful tingle of satisfaction one beholds mere trifles verifying the fact of social transplantation ! Would you choose a happy name for an office block ? Call it the New England Building. Would you defend the French pastry architecture of the Chamber of Commerce ? Jilt the truth, — say it is “ Bostonese.” So, too, in the open fields. Yonder amongst the blazing tiger lilies stands an old stone well, with an antiquated wellsweep and a mossy oaken bucket. Here, in a farmhouse, observe the rag carpet, and listen to the thump of a handloom in vigorous operation. Across the way a “ deestrict ’ schoolteacher is “larnin’” little children to spell “ caow.” At table they offer you baked beans. Yet those beans have suffered by transportation; they are a pale, wan, nostalgic sort of bean, without cheer or comeliness. Indeed, so far as I can learn, the baked bean is the least portable of all the herbs of the field.

Helen declares that she felt a pronounced jolt or bump when our Columblas crossed the forty-first parallel. As we had then passed the borders of Yankeedom, Southern traits became immediately apparent, — perhaps because we were looking for them. Later, when we had traversed the lands of the Pennsylvania Dutch and wheeled toward la belle rivière, we even kept watch against alligators. What wonder ? All about us were Southern trees, — the locust, the cedar, and the cypress. Strange Southern birds fluttered across our path. At night, in the wayside inn, a group of villagers munched peanuts and talked 'possum. More and more often we passed farmhouses with two-story piazzas, all curtained with the gorgeous honeysuckle. Towns teemed with darkies. Shop windows were hung with Southern songs, — ’Mid the Green Fields of Virginia, Echoes from Old Mobile, My Little Georgia Rose, — while Southern speech gave us a delicious sense of foreignness. People asked where our wheels were “at;” they longed to travel “ like we did ; ” they addressed Helen as “ you all;” at the “levees” along the Ohio River they “wanted on” or “wanted off; ” uniformly they “ reckoned ; ” and when describing the rise of the river, which landed baby carriages in treetops and beer kegs on the porches of churches, they called it “ a right smart flood.” And with all the rest went the pleasing, languid half, drawl which speaks of mellow Southern sunshine and the leisurely Southern temperament.

Besides, it was hot. The season had advanced a fortnight. Hence an inclination to lean against a cool stone wall and converse in slow talk, to “ loafe and invite my soul.” Were I a Southern Ohioan, my trousers, I know, would bag at the knees ; my front fence would moult pickets ; weeds would invade my garden ; and perchance I should have grown over-tolerant of those weeds of the soul, which — But on this point I spare severity. What if the Southern Ohioans are less rigorous of conscience than their Northern cousins ?

Note rather the charming Southern graces. How cheerily they greet you upon the highway! How familiarly strangers converse ! Here, for instance, in a trolley car, is my friend the carpenter talking earnestly with my friend the lawyer (whose father, by the way, was President of the United States ) ; a Buckeye complains that in Boston he failed to draw his barber into conversation. Even the northern part of the state is catching the spirit of democracy: in a country hotel, the hostler sat at table next the proprietor, and the waitress entertained her chief admirer on the front piazza. “ West,” said an Ohioan, — “ it, ’s everybody.” “ Yes,” replied the newcomer, “ and yet they are all talking about the Western Reserve. Darned if I see any! ”

The talk means genuine friendliness. In Southern Ohio, an utter stranger, overhearing my inquiry for lodgings, promptly took me in charge, got his shaving ticket advanced six numbers, lit up his office, and telephoned hither and yon till he got me quartered. Country folk are kinder yet ; along the Ohio River you may seek hospitality where you will, and always you will find it. Threaten to pay, and your host turns purple.

In Cincinnati we went to church. As the preacher was a temporary importation from New York city, we witnessed an occurrence. “ Brethren,” said he, “ brethren, let us so live that posterity will honor us as it honors Abraham Line— ” (pause ; confusion ; premonition of impending rough house) — “ um — ah — brethren, let us so live that posterity will honor us as it honors Stonewall Jackson ! ” I then perceived that while, geographically, the Ohio River skirts the southern border of the Buckeye State, it runs, sociologically, historically, and politically, across the middle of Ohio.

So, when all is told, Ohio is at once North and South; it is also — by grace of its longitude and of its social temper — both East and West. It has boxed the American compass.

III.

Social transplantation, then, is the leading fact in the life of the Ohioans. So it was with the Montanians. And in both cases you had an influx of people who came because they worshiped Mr. Raskin’s “ Goddess of Getting On.”

Yet how different the ritual! In Montana they praised their Diva Aurea with a miner’s pick ; the priest of the Ohioans was a man with a spade. In Montana the service was soon done; in Ohio the service has never ceased. The real contrast is this : getting on in Montana meant scurrying back East with your new-found treasure ere brigands held you up ; getting on in Ohio meant tilling the soil, building a house, taking a wife, establishing a reputation, and staying put. Pioneers in Montana called themselves “ prospectors ; ” pioneers in Ohio were “ movers.”

Now, whenever human beings people a new country with intent to stay there, the fact expresses itself architecturally. They build a church and they build a schoolhouse. Religion and education, mere afterthoughts in Montana, were matters of prime concern in Ohio.

The prayerfulness of Ohio is not without interest. Suppose the most splendid church in all that splendid commonwealth : let its style be decorated Gothic, done in sombre gray stone, with towers of pure perpendicular ; carve intricate traceries in numberless mullioned windows ; bring in the light through colored glass whose radiance leads forth the soul to “so near and yet so remote a paradise.” Say, now, to whom shall so grand a church belong ? To Congregationalists ? It may be. The Ohioans brought Congregationalism from old New England. Or to Presbyterians ? It is not unlikely. Presbyterians are strong in Ohio ; so are Episcopalians ; so, too, the Disciples, called Campbellites ; Baptists are rarer. Your noble church, then, might belong to any one of five denominations ; but I pledge you the chance is closer that it was built by a sixth, and that the Methodist. Amazing, you say, that a faith originally preached to peasants and colliers should have taken the trappings of fashion, — should even have come in peril of coldness and worldly vanity ! Yet so it is.

The reason is this : Methodism, thanks to the heroism of a squadron of circuit riders, conquered the primitive communities of Ohio. Its wealth came later. Nor was any faith more aptly suited to the pioneer than the crude, barbaric Methodism of those early days. It was at once a wholesome religion and a necessary safety valve. For your pioneer is ever a lusty fellow, with blood overstocked with red corpuscles and nerves overstrung with vitality. In Montana, such men were inwardly impelled to rob coaches, wreck barrooms, and hang thieves. In the Ohio forests, however, there was nothing worth stealing, nobody very much in need of hanging, and little occasion for “gun play.” “Revivals ” (of an obsolete pattern) supplied a genuine need; shouting took the place of shooting.

If the Methodists are the most important of the religious denominations in Ohio, the Dunkards —transplanted from Pennsylvania—are certainly the most picturesque. Towers of Schwarzenau, what bearded elders ! What simplicity of garment and habitude ! What shy girl faces smiling forth from Quakerish bonnets, and seeming to say, “ Ach, mein Herr, but this is a hideous fashion: consider, zum wenigsten, our liebenswürdige complexions!” And the joys of the Dunkards are chiefly these: they taste no wine; they keep out of court; they cling to one another with clannish devotion ; they wash one another’s feet; and they give and take the holy kiss, man kissing man, maid kissing maid. They are models of simple goodness.

One day, in the Western Reserve, I said, “ Helen, let’s visit the Mormons,” to which Helen replied with a shudder. Yet we found them a harmless folk. Their temple at Kirtland is an orthodox shrine, built in 1834 ; polygamy had not then been invented, nor have the Ohio Mormons any toleration for it. The Kirtland minister even opened the Book of Mormon and showed us a text which condemns plural marriages as “ an abomination unto the Lord.” “ Then where,” I asked, “ did polygamy come from ? ” “From the rascality of Joseph Smith’s successor, Brigham Young,” said he. “ Brigham Young was an apostate ; so are the Utah Mormons! ”

Kirtland was designedly but a temporary “stake” for the wide-pitched tabernacle of Mormonism, and it is wellnigh deserted now. Nevertheless, the strange gospel is heralded throughout Ohio, where each year adds new numbers to the “ Latter-Day Saints,” as they greatly prefer to be called. Indeed, they say: “There is no such thing as a Mormon ; ‘ Mormon ’ is only the name of the book we believe in. You might as well call Presbyterians ‘Bibles.'” The name Mormon was conferred by the Saints’ enemies and tormentors.

Orthodox Mormon ism is a stout Biblical faith, quite like that of our evangelical churches. To this they add that delicious grotesquerie of the golden plates, the transparent stone, and the “ reformed Egyptian ” records, which afford a “ second witness ” to the verities of Holy Writ. And where is the harm ? Am I less a Christian if I hold that a shining angel revealed to Mr. Ignatius Donnelly the non-Shakespearean origin of Shakespeare? Oris that genial country parson a theologic outcast and gutter snipe because to a conventional creed he appends a conviction that the messenger of the Lord revealed to Joe Smith the history of the North American continent prior to its discovery by Columbus ? By no means. Neither, I take it, need I rebuke ray Mormon friend for explaining the prehistoric mounds. “ Defensive earthworks,” said he. “ Yes,” I replied, “ that is what the best archæologists say.” “ To be sure they do,” he rejoined. “ Science is daily verifying the Book of Mormon ! ”

Aside from the good Dunkards and the Latter-Day Saints, the religious element in Ohio is sedately conventional. Moreover, without excess or vagary, it is exceptionally pronounced. The churches are crowded ; men attend; the evening service succeeds. The Ohioans have sent out more foreign missionaries than the people of any other state. They have also produced two of the most brilliant preachers in the American pulpit: Frank Gunsaulus of Chicago, and Charles Jefferson of New York.

Thus much for the heart of Ohio : what now of its brain ? “ The world is saved,” said an ancient rabbi, — “ the world is saved by the breath of little children in school; ” and so say the Ohioans. Country schools are splendidly housed ; every school has its library ; often the teachers are men. Of late groups of district schools are being “ centralized,” which means that half a dozen schools are consolidated, and the children brought to each session in covered wagons. (Happy thought, — improved instruction without increased expense.) And as for matters in town, President Eliot recommended the Cleveland school system for Boston, and Eastern states are continually sending committees to spy out the methods of Buckeye pedagogy. Although the state supports no normal schools, freedom of experiment makes Ohio a breeder of teachers. President Charles F. Thwing, of the admirably equipped and ably administered Western Reserve University, spends half his time restraining the Yale trustees from abducting his professors. Ohio has several excellent colleges; and yet this same Ohio is primarily responsible for coeducation ; it is also to blame for some nine-and-twenty monohippic “ universities.”

I have read in a learned treatise upon coeducation that at Oberlin “ the student body embraces young women.” So ? Oberlin has wooden footways — two narrow planks, set wide apart, the space between being filled with exceedingly sharp stones — called “ co-ed. walks : ” now I know why. I also perceive why my friend Satterlee, who was coeducated at Oberlin, carries his arms so queerly. Satterlee’s left arm hangs down straight; his right arm, however, is warped or bent in an affectionate curve.

Where “ co-ed. walks " fail, shall laws succeed? If an Oberlin student would take a girl walking, he must file an application with the mother superior. If he meets a young lady upon the street, he must not turn about to accompany her; if, however, he overtake her, the two may continue together. The youth therefore passes by, proceeds forty paces, wheels around, and (the law and the prophets being fulfilled) catches up. It is strictly forbidden to treat girls, though the giving of presents is permitted : hence, while shunning the soda fountain, you supply the young lady with bonbons, delivered in the original package, but not consumed on the premises. Such legislation produces the normal effect. Oberlin chants a response of its own : “ Lord have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to break these laws! ”

Coeducation, I admit, may possess merits I know not of ; but the truth is, it began as a makeshift, when the Ohioans were too poor to provide separate colleges for girls. Makeshifts also were the monohippic “ universities,” for which there is no longer any conceivable excuse. Helen, who so far forgot herself as to visit one of those sorry establishments, brought tidings of two or three dilapidated buildings, four ill-kempt “ professors,” a curriculum better suited to a second-rate high school, a student rabble made up of poor Smikes (of both sexes), and a president who drives from door to door through the country drumming up pupils. And this they call a “ university ” ! They permit it to grant degrees ! What wonder, then, that so disgraceful a situation invites a violent remedy ? Already the bugles are blowing, the regiment is formed in hollow square, they will cut away both buttons and stripes ; but the monohippic “ university,” like Danny Deever, dies hard. It has ever the same defense: “ The greatest heroes of Ohio received monohippic educations,” — a plea which seems rather to illustrate the uses of adversity.

Yet the main question is, not method, but result. Despite its incidental humors, the educational system of the Ohioans somehow produces an accretion of practical, hard-headed horse sense, like that which Captain Lemuel Gulliver observed in the isle of the Houyhnhnms. Nowhere is the diffusion of knowledge more free from objectionable by-products. In Boston you find a more exquisite culture ; but in Boston you also find more Spiritualists, more Esoteric Buddhists, more Christian Scientists, more people who see things and hear things and smell things.

Bostonians, I fancy, would ill appreciate the intellectual temper of the Ohioans. They would turn away in contempt at a dozen mispronounced words. The state is uniformly called “ Ahia; ” “ idea ” receives the accent on the first syllable ; innumerable oddities amaze you ; and even the dictates of grammar go disregarded. I met in one of the cities of Southern Ohio a young Bostonian, who said: “ I simply detest this place. There are negroes on the police force, a man takes a woman’s arm, the theatres are in full blast on Sunday, and there are ‘ ladies’ parlors ’ attached to the saloons ; but what hurts me worst is, they all say ‘lay’ for ‘lie’!” I think it, however, a little more charitable to attribute the vagaries of Ohioan ‘English to what President Thwing has called the Buckeye “ individualism.” Every man says what is right in his own ears.

Suppose, now, some Bostonian should really seek it, I promise he will find in Ohio the spirit of Copley Square. Though the movement for the higher culture is new, — so new that the last ten years have shown a distinct advance, — there is no sort of flamboyancy or unrestful haste about it. The Chicagoans say they are “ making culture hum ; ” in Ohio, on the other hand, these finer growths are coming to a golden fruitage by grace of quiet sunshine and patient, loving care. And the fruitage already abounds,—a notable development in literary taste, a devotion to great music, an enthusiasm for art, a novel admiration for good architecture, and an increasing desire to ennoble the surroundings of common life.

A hundred praiseworthy tendencies unite for progress. Is there a new taste for the essay, for “ mere literature,” for the volume of enchanted verse ? That is due in part to the colleges, to the popularity of the literary lecture (Ohio is the best lecture state in the West), to the work of women’s clubs, and to the missionary enthusiasm of certain librarians. “ My aim,” said an Ohio librarian, “ is best worded in this way : ‘ Give the man another book.’ ” Nor can I overlook the influence of such literary societies as the Rowfant Club, who, when they meet beneath their emblematic candles at the sign of the gopher, become, like gentle Keats, men “ of no opinions except in matters of taste.” So, little by little, it has come to pass that Ohio — which produced William Dean Howells, Constance Fenimore Woolson, John Hay, Alice and Phœbe Cary, and George Kennan, all of whom moved out of the state — has set about acquiring that sympathy with letters and good studies which in days to come will tempt the native author to bide content at home.

In the realm of music, Cincinnati, with her Pilsener and her Wienerwurst, her violin and merry Trinklied, sits undisputed Kaiserin. In painting, also, and the reciprocal art of appreciation, it may be that taste is fullest matured amongst the Cincinnatians. But little result have they as yet to boast of, and no doubt for many a year their artists will follow the example of Whittredge, Wyant, Twachtmann, Enneking, Sonntag, Kenyon Cox, the Beards, and the sculptors Powers and Ward, and live in some more congenial region. Architects, on the contrary, find Ohio a Canaan of limitless promise, especially since the World’s Fair. Yet perhaps, when all is told, it is in love of the minor arts that Ohio has progressed farthest. Ask the foreign commissionnaires. They will tell you that the choicest of glass, the finest china, the most exquisite of wrought iron, hammered brass, and gleaming silver, — unstinted in cost and unrivaled in artistic excellence, — goes to Boston and Cleveland. Here, too, one may trace the influence of the World’s Fair and of European travel.

But the heart of the matter is this : Ohio is in its second generation. The makers of that sturdy commonwealth had neither means nor leisure nor inclination for the mere refinements of life. Besides, the torment of anxiety and the hardship of crude existence left little room for the play of the æsthetic sentiments. As Aunt Chloe put it. “ Doan’ kyar fob sunset wiv dust in yo’ eyes ! ” And yet those same drudge-bound toilers amassed the wealth which, as in mediæval Venice, became the basis of the new culture. “ Money, which represents the prose of life,” said Emerson, — and he might have uttered the words in Dayton or Springfield or Toledo, — “ money, which represents the prose of life, and which is hardly spoken of in parlors without an apology, is, in its effects and laws, as beautiful as roses.”

IV.

On the grounds of the State House in Columbus the Ohioans have set up a most interesting monument. Completely encircling a lofty plinth stand the bronze statues of William Teeumseh Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, Salmon P. Chase, Philip Henry Sheridan, Rutherford B. Hayes, and James Abram Garfield, while above them the Genius of Ohio stretches forth her hands. And upon the plinth are carven the words, “ These are my jewels. ”

Add to the names of Grant, Hayes, and Garfield that of William McKinley ; recall that Benjamin Harrison was born in Ohio; consider that William Henry Harrison was called from his farm at North Bend to the White House ; reflect that George Washington was not made chief magistrate until he had been in Ohio ; and confess yourself amazed ! Why all this presidentiality ?

Helen (the precious cannibal!) has just consumed The Man of Genius, and is for solving the problem after the manner of Lombroso. “ Let us begin,’ she says, “ by making red stars on the map of Ohio wherever Presidents have occurred. Then we will calculate the area of the state, forty thousand square miles; the population, four millions and a half ; the legal rate of interest, six per cent; the mean temperature, fifty-three degrees; the annual rainfall, thirty-six inches; and the mean elevation above the sea, eight hundred and eighty-seven feet. Let us also note the absence of mountains, the scarcity of little lakes, and the almost total lack of summer resorts. Then, perhaps, we shall see what makes Presidents.” So we have procured a map, and the disciple of Lombroso has gone at her task. There is no telling what will come of it. Meanwhile, my own excogitations leave Lombroso on a siding. Remembering the Rev. William Paley’s gold repeater lying flat on its back in the highway, I cleave to the argument for design.

From the very first the Ohioans set their hearts upon seizing the government at Washington, and to this end they exercised unparalleled discretion in the choice of ancestors. Early Ohio, as we have seen, was a selection of daring, masterful spirits from all America. Nor was that all : it was a mingling of widely varied peoples. Hence a stock endowed with indomitable energy. The Glenns of Sweet Auburn, in whose veins flows a salmon-hued, homogeneous fluid, are for sitting on their thumbs and waiting for the future to come. Not so the Ohioans. And ill content with breeding an extraordinary type of manhood, Ohio began to discipline that type. Out of the lair of the wolf came the founder of old Rome, and out of the Ohio forest came rulers for young America. Yet, zounds, what jeering ! “ William Henry Harrison,” shouted a thousand voices at once, “ is fitter to sit in a cabin of buckeye logs and drink hard cider than to preside in the White House ! ” Ah, but were not those precisely the best antecedents for a President? The Ohioans therefore revived the log-cabin song of an earlier campaign : —

And this is how the snowy-bloom horsechestnut lent its name to presidential Ohio, — a good name, full of suggestiveness of that school of adversity through which the Ohioans passed to power. In making Ohio they made themselves.

Moreover, as Mr. Eliot Gregory points out in his charming Worldly Ways and By-Ways, election to office is partly a matter of external appearance. Mr. Chamberlain with his monocle and Mr. Balfour with his white gaiters are safe enough in England, but here we should “snow them under.” Tradition pictures the American statesman as a plain citizen, whose foppery is of the inner man. Aware of this, the Ohioans, in spite of their wealth, dress simply, avoid pretense, and despise affected manners. That splendid Cleveland newspaper is well named, — the Ohioans are a nation of Plain Dealers. There are not a hundred silk hats in the state.

Assured of blood and of pioneer training ; assured, also, of a prudent political exterior, the Buckeyes set about making Ohio one vast college of civics. They reduced the governor’s appointing power, that there might be more officers elected by ballot; they divided their territory into eighty-eight counties, each a political centre or vortex ; they arranged that every public question should be ferociously debated in district schoolhouses. And in such debates you felt the force of discordant ancestry. Cavalier joined issue with Puritan, Knickerbocker with Pennsylvania Dutchman, Quaker with Kentuckian ; no two men had the same point of view. Never, I venture to propose, did argument draw redder fire from keener steel. And although there are not wanting those philosophic cynics who urge that political excitement, like feminine loveliness, runs but skin-deep, there is no denying that the common people get monstrously cross about it.

Again, in a country as big as ours, it is not only necessary to find the man who would be king; he must hail from the right place. Geography is as truly the half of polling bits of paper as it is of shooting bits of lead. And herein were the Ohioans not unthoughtful. They took for their plot of ground a state close to the heart of things. All the world believes in Ohio. You traverse Ohio in order to get anywhere ; and although you may stupidly regard it as merely something to go through on the cars (preferably by night), it undeniably exists. Far different in the popular mind are those fairy, half-legendary principalities which stand for palm vistas, or for crimson buttes, or for Midsummer Night’s Dreams done in fragrant orange blossoms. Besides, we can trust Ohio with the gravest responsibilities. Its enormous agricultural population makes for conservatism. So does its wealth.

Having seized a superb location, the Ohioans proceeded to pack three or four other states with willing adherents. In the earlier day, when covered wagons went rumbling along the National Pike, with “.Illinois,” “ Wisconsin,” or “ Iowa ” blazoned upon them, the Buckeyes saw their opportunity and joined in. To-day you find Ohio Societies in half a dozen Western commonwealths. The Ohio papers speak reverently of “ex-Ohio men ; ” “ ex-Ohioans ” adore Ohio ; and when an Ohioan is nominated for the presidency, all “ ex-Ohioans ” fling their hats heavenward and cheer for the nation. The candidate is therefore . supported by an army of old neighbors, numbering, in the delightful enumeration of Jimmie Brown, “ mornamillion.”

Might not one have supposed that so deep a plot, already constituting the most astounding political conspiracy of the century, could dispense with further precaution ? Alas, no ; the Ohioans are of one flesh with Luther’s devil ; their “ hidden craft is matchless.” They must make Ohio an October state, which means that the state campaign would be fought on a hilltop, and could not be hid. Each presidential year the whole country stood waiting, with its hand on its heart and its eye on Ohio, to see how the state elections would result; for as went Ohio, so went the nation. Thus, whoever won the field in Ohio became a world-wide celebrity. Columbus served as a stepping stone to Washington. Pet six months of acute political mania cost Ohio dearly. Business was halted, sleep disturbed, education debauched, every sane interest deranged. When, therefore, the Rev. Dr. Washington Gladden suggested a change, all Buckeyes acquieseed, and made Ohio a November state. Then rose up prophets, declaring that the Buckeye dynasty was once for all dethroned. Yet the Ohioans are at it again : witness William McKinley.

Such — unless the Lombroso method should outdo itself (which I doubt) — is the story of how a free people have been run away with. “ And now,” say I, “ so be it, —so be it! ” Why complain if an Ohioan hold the national sceptre ? Were we not at a loss to choose a better to rule over us ? “ Certainly it is a fearful business.” wrote Thomas Carlyle in his wonderful chapter on the king as the man who can, — “ certainly it is a fearful business, that of having your Ableman to seek, and not knowing in what manner to proceed about it !" Considering the gravity of this “ fearful business,” America owes a debt of gratitude to the Ohioans. They have graciously helped us out.

Rollin Lynde Hartt.