Rhine," or their streets, their newspapers, their language, and they make the beer which they drink in company with the Americans, who have learned to like some German customs. But the people of the second generation of Germans rather resent their inherited foreignness, and become more sternly American than those whose fathers and grandfathers were not only to the manner, but to the manor born. The Americanism of the young German who insists on the English tongue and who discontinues the paternal German newspaper is newer and shinier than the old nativity, smoothed as it is by its passage down from generation to generation; but the German-American, as he is called, is genuine; and there are others, too.
But, to return, the American, he of the American ancestry, has stamped himself, his social traits, his intellectual quality, his moving energy, his spiritual gifts, upon this Middle West. The institutions of this land are his. The New England prayer-meeting and the New England town meeting have moved onward through the Mohawk Valley and have settled down in Ohio and the other States in near neighborhood to the social graces of the Old South, with its dominating county, the two joined more closely by the propinquity of the New-Yorker and the Pennsylvanian, who were prone to the middle way, intellectually and politically as well as geographically.
On these lakes—to return once more—we see the tall chimney, and the great ore-ship of seven or eight thousand tons burden, its heavy cargo loaded and trimmed at the ore-docks at Duluth in little more than a half-hour. We see the great masses of shining copper on the wharves at Hancock and at Houghton. We are rarely out of sight of trade and commerce. We are rarely without a reminder of the enormous riches which are stored up in the earth under what used to be the forest where the old French explorer trod, and whose people were taught in spiritual things by the old French Jesuits, and whose cruelty and savagery were set aflame by French and English soldiers. "Gone is the forest primeval," but suddenly we find, in the lands which the lumberman deserted because he thought that he had robbed them of all their commercial value, such stores of iron ore that the like has never been seen before—ore that is shovelled out as the ooze of rivers is shovelled out by great dredges.
We see, too, the school for the teaching of mining engineers rising above the copper-heaps at Houghton; we see from the deck of the boat the monument at Cleveland—a constant reminder of the fervid patriotism of Garfield's State; we catch glimpses of other schools marked by the constant flagstaff, of parks at the waterside near Detroit, and, strangest of all, or at least most original of all, the little summer community at St. Clair—the "Little Venice," with its villas built on the edge of the water, with canals for its pathways, while its people, who seem to live in bathing-clothes and in boats, fill the air with a constant splashing and laughter which must disturb the placid British demeanor of the near-by opposite Canadian shore.
From these lakes we would know the land on which they border—its enterprise, its vocations and its avocations, its mysterious and poetic history, punctuated here and there, as by the white fort at Mackinac; but the country, like other countries, must be studied more closely than from the decks of a steamer. To the great joy and happiness and profit of this part of the land, remoteness from the seaboard seems to diminish social conventions. One finds both free manners and stiffness in the West, as in New England and in the Middle States—a freedom and friendly exuberance which may best be illustrated by the abandon following the wedding, and a stiff formality which is made most apparent in the observance of the social requirements of a funeral.
To look at social life in a large or in a general way, we find first of all a more definite line drawn between the sexes. The women flock together and the men together more than is the case in the East. There is a distinction between the intellectual planes occupied by the two, a good deal to the advantage of the women. The Middle West, or that phase of it which we are now considering, has so long ceased to be frontier that it is only on the extreme verge, as your train moves off toward the Rocky
