communities have been less violent in this region of sober industry. The opportunities of the Ohio Valley have also favored the growth of that legitimate manufacturing interest which is now the only reliable basis of prosperity for any inland city. There is no region of this country more blessed with comfort than this; and, when an elevated public spirit does finally awake, it will find a plethoric treasury in the accumulations of the last half-century. As yet, the higher forms of enterprise, in the way of donations for matters of great public utility and refinement, are not largely developed here. In Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis, the persistent efforts of a few Northern men have secured a good system of public schools. But the general standard of education through all this region is far below the more northern latitudes. The colleges are drooping and second-rate; art and music, public lectures, and the higher grades of theatrical entertainment, meet a comparatively frigid encouragement. There is far less stir of ideas than in Michigan, Western New York, Northern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, among the masses. In politics this region has been for years the debatable ground of the Free States. The Germans of Cincinnati and St. Louis have saved those cities to freedom; and, in a few localities, the same spirit early achieved a triumph. But, up to the period of the war, this district was a reliable ally of the slave-power in any emergency. The treason of the North, outside the Irish Brigade and its American officers in a few cities, was found in this belt of population; whole reaches of South Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois being really as favorable to the rebellion as Tennessee, Missouri, or Kentucky: and on every election day the old battle rages anew. The churches are characterized by a lack of interest in theology. While generally adhering nominally to the oldest of “old-school" creeds, there is far less theological bigotry than in the newschool churches of New England. Christian institutions represent far more the social than the religious tendencies of the people of Cincinnati, St. Louis, and the country adjacent. There is not a first-class theologian or preacher in this whole area, between Pittsburg and Leavenworth. The leaders

in the churches are men like Purcell, McIlvaine, Eliot, Clarke, and Post; admirable in social and executive capacity, but with no extended reputation as thinkers, writers, or preachers. A religion of the emotions, passions, and social sentiments, which warms the surface or explodes into revivals, leaving the will and practical life yet unchanged, is the most popular faith.

But in social life — as far as relates to the pleasant intercourse of families, neighbors, and friends, and the whole region of social amusement, general mingling of acquaintances, and an open-armed, affectionate hospitality to strangers this district is a charming contrast to the radical North. There is a far greater portion of life given to making life agreeable than among the more intense peoples along the Lake shores. Wealth pours out in unstinted measures for personal indulgence, expensive and luxurious living, and foreign travel. As long as man desires to live for the sake of a genial "good time," these cities and villages, like Philadelphia, which they greatly resemble, are the most charming places in the West. The country, too, is far more attractive, and the climate more agreeable, than farther north.

But, so far, the most refined social life here runs in the aristocratic channels worn by the Southern leaders of society. The South gave the social law to Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, and the valley of the Ohio. Almost every wealthy family has a Southern wing; and, before the Slave States plunged into rebellion, this region was a social suburb of the South. The law of Southern society is the exaltation of a family to permanent power, with no care for the corresponding elevation of the people. To build up a great family, connect it with other old and powerful families, educate the children abroad, and select its society from the aristocracy of the whole land, is its ideal of social life. All public spirit is subordinate to family aggrandizement; and, while men of vast wealth and high culture are spending fabulous sums on their family estates and foreign travels, great public institutions languish. With greater established wealth, social refinement, and expensive living than any Western city; with

numbers of its rich citizens dwelling and travelling most expensively abroad,- Cincinnati has no large public library, no permanent gallery of art, no respectable theatre, no safe large hall for music or popular entertainments, no association with pluck to sustain a course of scientific or popular lectures, no literary periodical, and no concentration of its able and educated people to do any good thing. All good and great plans finally near the rim of this maelstrom of a luxurious sentimental life, and go down into the paradise of Catawba and oysters. The war has made a terrible inroad upon this old aristocracy of the valley of the Ohio. Too many of its leading families were rebel, or divided, to be forgiven. The people have already decreed its reconstruction, and when that comes a broader foundation will be laid; and, while we lose nothing of our present delightful social sentiment, we shall not make our refinement the silken covering of our selfishness, and contempt for the rights of man.

Out of this region has come, however, a large proportion of the eminent statesmen, jurists, and commanders of the West. Grant and Sherman and Sheridan, Logan and Oglesby, Rosecranz and Burnside, and their brilliant crowd of companions in glorious deeds; the Ewings and Shermans, Corwin, Stanton, Chase, Morton, Lincoln, Speed, Benton, are by birth or education the growth of this region. With the exception of Cass and Douglas, both New-England men, no man of large proportions has yet got into national politics from the North-west. And while in war the bravery of its soldiery was eminent, neither the North-west nor Western New York produced a first-class general, save McPherson. The North-west swarms with acute lawyers, shrewd politicians, and able, agitating, radical statesmen of secondary calibre; but, somehow, the slower, less exciting society of our central region seems better adapted to the growth of those massive men who can calmly comprehend great interests of state, and put forth tremendous energies in organizing and leading men. The rampant individualism. of the North-west breeds a personal conceit of infallibility unfavorable to greatness. The radical fever in the blood

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keeps the spirit lean, hectic, fiery, ready to put on wings and fly away into the future millennium; but not quite able to deal wisely with the present aspect of this mixed America.

The North-west, in its relations to the central region, reminds one of a splendid, eager, overpowering lover, battering away at the heart of a somewhat sleepy, but deep-souled and large-hearted maiden, who, alternately charmed and offended, at last surrenders, and becomes the wife of a man who is sure to come out at fifty a far nobler specimen of massive manhood than otherwise he could have been. The spirited cities and communities of the Lakes by turns ridicule and denounce our slow and undemonstrative region of the valleys; but the Lakes will end by marrying the valleys. Already Northern politics have revolutionized "Egypt," lifted up Indiana into a leading State, and sentenced the Pendletons and Pughs of Ohio to political exile. Northern ideas of industry, education, and society will follow. When this union of these States is complete, the Western character will be far more weighty, deliberate, and genial than now. May a good Providence speed that wedding-day!

In this final crystallization of the Western character, the German element of our population will doubtless be influential. Especially will the great masses of honest, industrious, kindly, slow but broad and deep-souled German farmers and mechanics and laborers, be a vast mine of healthy life, out of which can be drawn treasures of private and public worth. Even the Catholic Germans, who are the lowest of all, are not so obstinately wedded to the hierarchy that they will refuse to blend finally with the best elements of our population. The German Jews are often as genuine Americans as they" to the manor born." The Protestant German people are generally intelligent, industrious, economical, and virtuous as men can be who live chiefly in the realm of material comfort and social enjoyment. The complex despotisms of Central Europe have done their work upon them; for there is something in German despotism so subtle, elaborate, and persistent, that it seems to paralyze whole regions of the human mind.

The worst result of this Central European order of society on its subject masses is this paralyzing of the spiritual nature. Our German emigrants are now the most grossly materialistic of the American people. They live in this world as if there could be no other, and treat their bodies as if they were only the temples of a refined nervous organization. But this is a transition state. The thunders, lightnings, and earthquakes of our new Western life will split this stolid crust of materialism; and out of these good-natured, moderate, stingy, prosaic Hermanns and Minnas, will come the poets, the artists, the singers, the statesmen, and the saints of the West. They have no new ideas to give us; but their moderation, patience, and kindliness will be a fine atmosphere to pour around our fierce, restless intellectualism, and lunatic haste to build the millennium. The able men who represent this section of our German population are already among our most valuable citizens, and largely influential in our public, social, and religious affairs.

The least influential class of Germans will be that crowd of wild, long-haired, beer-drinking philosophers, who, on the strength of temporary residence inside a German University and banishment for revolutionary tendencies, put on Continental airs, and regard themselves as the legislators for the future American society. The headquarters of this tribe seems to be the State of Missouri; but they have active allies in all the cities and villages of the West. They are so near materialism and atheism in their central philosophy, that a wise man does not care to analyze the residuum of spiritual nature they leave in the crucible, to learn whether it be the soul or the sediment of the universe. In politics they are the wildest of impracticables, and were a sharp thorn in the side of long-suffering Abraham Lincoln during the war. Their political idol was John C. Fremont, a romantic, miscellaneous French savan, accidentally made candidate for President and Commander-in-Chief in the West. Their social theories are admirably accommodating; their ideas of education, amusement, labor, the organization of society itself, ranging through all the varieties of communism.