To this growth of the University must be added the most happy inception and growth of Radcliffe College, marking as it does the maturing of a new era in the education of women. We may well wish for Radcliffe a career as noble and as useful as that of Harvard, and I doubt not that such is in store for it. A word must be said of the Episcopal Theological School, based upon ideas as sound and broad as Christianity; and of the New-Church Theological School, more recently founded. We must hail such indications of the tendency toward making our Cambridge the centre for the untrammelled study of the most vital problems that can occupy the human mind.
But the day we are celebrating is a civic, not a university occasion, and I must dwell no longer upon academic themes. We are signalizing the anniversary of the change which we once made from government by town meeting to city government. Have we a good reason for celebrating that change? Has our career as a civic community been worthy of approval? In answering this question, I shall not undertake to sum up the story of our public schools and library; our hospital and charity organizations; the excellent and harmonious work of our churches, Protestant and Catholic; our Prospect Union, warmly to be commended; our arrangements for water supply and sewage; and our admirable park system (in which we may express a hope that Elmwood will be included). This interesting and suggestive story may be read in the semi-centennial volume, "The Cambridge of Eighteen Hundred and Ninety-Six," just issued from the Riverside Press. It is an enlivening story of progress, but like every story it has a moral, and I am going to pass over details and make straight for that moral. Americans are a bragging race because they have enjoyed immense opportunities, and are apt to forget that the true merit lies, not in the opportunity, but in the use we make of it. Much gratifying progress can be achieved in spite of the worst sort of blundering and sinning on the part of governments. The greater part, indeed, of human progress within historic times has been thus achieved. A good deal of the progress of which Americans are wont to boast has been thus achieved. Now the moral of our story is closely concerned with the fact that in the city of Cambridge such has not been the case. Our city government has from the outset been upright, intelligent, and helpful. We are satisfied with it. We do not wish to change it. In this respect the experience of Cambridge is very different from that of many other American cities. The government of our cities is acknowledged to be a problem of rare difficulty, so that it has begun to seem a natural line of promotion for a successful mayor to elect him governor, and then to send him to the White House! In some cities one finds people inclined to give up the problem as insoluble. I was lately assured by a gentleman in a city which I will not name, but more than a thousand miles from here, that the only cure for the accumulated wrongs of that community would be an occasional coup d'état, with the massacre of all the city officers. So the last word of our boasted progress, when it comes to municipal government, is declared to be the Oriental idea of "despotism tempered by assassination"! Now to what cause or causes are we to ascribe the contrast between Cambridge and the cities that are so wretchedly governed? The answer is, that in Cambridge we keep city government clear of politics, we do not mix up municipal questions with national questions. If I may repeat what I have said elsewhere, "since the object of a municipal election is simply to secure an upright and efficient municipal government, to elect a city magistrate because he is a Republican or a Democrat is about as sensible as to elect him because he believes in homœopathy or has a taste for chrysanthemums." Upon this plain and obvious principle of common sense our city has acted, on the whole with remarkable success, during its half century of municipal existence. The results we see all about us, and the example may be commended as an object lesson to all who are interested in the most vital work that can occupy the mind of an American,—the work of elevating the moral tone of public life. For it is neither wealth, nor power, nor cunning, nor craft that exalts a nation, but righteousness and the fear of the Lord.
An essay from
Century of Science and Other Essays, 1899
THE
COUNTRY-SIDE:
SUSSEX
By Richard Jefferies
I
On the wall of an old barn by the great doors there still remains a narrow strip of notice-board, much battered and weather-beaten: 'Beware of steel —' can be read, the rest has been broken off, but no doubt it was 'traps.' 'Beware of steel traps,' a caution to thieves—a reminiscence of those old days which many of our present writers and leaders of opinion seem to think never existed. When the strong labourer could hardly earn 7s. a week, when in some parishes scarcely half the population got work at all, living, in the most literal sense, on the parish, when bread was dear and the loaf was really life itself, then that stern inscription had meaning enough. The granaries were full, the people half starved. The wheat was threshed by the flail in full view of the wretched, who could gaze through the broad doors at the golden grain; the sparrows helped themselves, men dare not. At night men tried to steal the corn, and had to be prevented by steel traps, like rats. To-day wheat is so cheap, it scarcely pays to carry it to market. Some farmers have it ground, and sell the flour direct to the consumer; some have used it for feeding purposes—actually for hogs. The contrast is extraordinary. Better let the hogs eat the corn than that man should starve. To-day the sparrows are just as busy as ever of old, chatter, chirp around the old barn, while the threshing machine hums, and every now and then lowers its voice in a long-drawn descending groan of seemingly deep agony. Up it rises again as the sheaves are cast in—hum, hum, hum; the note rises and resounds and fills the yard up to the roof of the barn and the highest tops of the ricks as a flood fills a pool, and overflowing, rushes abroad over the fields, past the red hop-oast, past the copse of yellowing larches, onwards to the hills. An inarticulate music—a chant telling of the sunlit hours that have gone and the shadows that floated under the clouds over the beautiful wheat. No more shall the tall stems wave in the wind or listen to the bees seeking the clover-fields. The lark that sang above the green corn, the partridge that sheltered among the yellow stalks, the list of living things delighting in it—all have departed. The joyous life of the wheat is ended—not in vain, for now the grain becomes the life of man, and in that object yet more glorified. Outwards the chant extending, reaches the hollows of the valley, rolling over the shortened stubble, where the plough already begins the first verse of a new time. A pleasant sound to listen to, the hum of the threshing, the beating of the engine, the rustle of the straw, the shuffle shuffle of the machine, the voices of the men, the occupation and bustle in the autumn afternoon! I listened to it sitting in the hop-oast, whose tower, like a castle turret, overlooks and domineers the yard. In the loft the resounding hum whirled around, beating and rebounding from the walls, and forcing its way out again through the narrow window. The edge, as it were, of a sunbeam lit up the rude chamber crossed with unhewn beams and roofed above with unconcealed tiles, whose fastening pegs were visible. A great heap of golden scales lay in one corner, the hops fresh from the drying. Up to his waist in a pocket let through the floor a huge giant of a man trod the hops down in the sack, turning round and round, and now his wide shoulders and now his red cheeks succeeded. The music twirled him about as a leaf by the wind. Without the rich blue autumn sky; within the fragrant odour of hops, the hum of the threshing circling round like the buzz of an immense bee. As the hum of insects high in the atmosphere of midsummer suits and fits to the roses and the full green meads, so the hum of the threshing suits to the yellowing leaf and drowsy air of autumn. The iteration of hum and monotone soothes, and means so much more in its inarticulation than the adjusted chords and tune of written music. Laughing, the children romped round the ricks; they love the threshing and flock to it, they watch the fly-wheel rotating, they look in at the furnace door when the engine-driver stokes his fire, they gaze wonderingly at the gauge, and long to turn the brass taps; then with a shout they rush to chase the unhappy mice dislodged from the corn. The mice hide themselves in the petticoats of the women working at the 'sheening,' and the cottager when she goes home in the evening calls her cat and shakes them out of her skirts. By a blue waggon