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size of Indianapolis, returned 23,000, Rochester, with 7000 fewer people, returned 40,000; and Worcester, in a total of 118,000, reported 37,000 as foreign-born. A considerable body of Germans and German-Americans have contributed much to the making of the city; but the town has been passed over by the Swedes, Poles, and Bohemians that are to be reckoned with in many American cities. There are, however, 5000 negro voters in the city. Indianapolis is marked again by the stability of its population. A large percentage of the householders own their homes; and a substantial body of labor is thus assured to the community.

Indiana was admitted as a state in 1816, and the General Assembly, sitting at Corydon in 1821, designated Indianapolis, then a settlement of straggling cabins, as the state capital. The name of the new town was not adopted without a struggle, Tecumseh, Suwarro, and Concord being proposed and supported, while the name finally chosen was opposed for reasons not wholly academic. It is of record that the first mention of the name Indianapolis in the legislature caused great merriment. The town was laid out in broad streets, which were quickly adorned with shade trees that are an abiding testimony to the foresight of the founders. Alexander Ralston, one of the engineers employed in the first survey, had served in a similar capacity at Washington, and the diagonal avenues, the generous breadth of the streets, and the circular plaza at the monument are suggestive of the national capital. The urban landscape lacks variety: the town is perfectly flat, and in old times the mud was intolerable, but the trees are a continuing glory.

Central Indiana was not, in 1820, when the first cabin was built, a region of unalloyed delight. The land was rich, but it was covered with heavy woods, and much of it was under water. Indians still roamed the forests, and the builder

of the first cabin was killed by them. There were no roads, and White River, on whose eastern shore the town was built, was navigable only by the smallest craft. Mrs. Beecher, in From Dawn to Daylight, described the region as it appeared in the forties: "It is a level stretch of land as far as the eye can reach, looking as if one good, thorough rain would transform it into an impassable morass. How the inhabitants contrive to get about in rainy weather, I can't imagine, unless they use stilts. The city itself has been redeemed from this slough, and presents quite a thriving appearance, being very prettily laid out, with a number of fine buildings." Dr. Eggleston, writing in his novel Roxy of the same period, lays stress on the saffron hue of the community, the yellow mud seeming to cover all things animate and inanimate.

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But the founders possessed faith, courage, and hardihood. Too great stress cannot be laid on their work. They sacrificed personal ambition for the good of the community. Their patriotism even was touched with the zeal of their religion. For many years before the civil war a parade of the Sunday-school children of the city was the chief feature of every Fourth of July celebration. The founders appreciated their opportunity, and labored from the first in the interest of morality and enlightenment. young capital was a converging point for a slender stream of population that bore in from New England, and a broader curTent that swept westward from the Middle and Southeastern states. There was no sectional feeling in those days. Many of the prominent settlers from Kentucky were Whigs, but a newcomer's church affiliation was of far more importance than his political belief. Indianapolis was charged in later years with a lack of public spirit, but with reference only to commercial matters. There has never been a time when a hearing could not be had for any undertaking of philanthropy or public education.

The effect of the civil war upon Indianapolis was immediate and far-reaching. It emphasized through the centralizing there of the state's military energy the fact that it was the capital city,· a fact which until that time had been accepted languidly by the average Hoosier countryman. The presence within the state of an aggressive body of sympathizers with Southern ideas directed attention throughout the country to the energy and resourcefulness of Morton, the war governor, who pursued the Hoosier Copperheads relentlessly, while raising a great army to send to the seat of war. Again, the intense political bitterness engendered by the war did not end with peace, or with the restoration of good feeling in neighboring states, but continued for twenty-five years more to be a source of political, and, markedly at Indianapolis, a cause of social irritation. In the minds of many, a Democrat was a Copperhead, and a Copperhead was an evil and odious thing. Referring to the slow death of this feeling, a veteran observer of affairs who had, moreover, supported Mr. Cleveland's candidacy twice, recently said that he had never been able wholly to free himself from this prejudice. But the end really came in 1884, with the reaction against Blaine, which was nowhere more significant of a growth of independence than at Indianapolis.

Following the formative period, which may be said to have ended with the civil war, came an era of prosperity in business, and even of splendor in social matters. Some handsome habitations had been built in the ante-bellum days, but they were at once surpassed by the homes which many citizens reared for themselves in the seventies. These remain, as a group, the handsomest residences that have ever been built at any period in the history of the city. Life had been earnest in the early days, but it now became picturesque. The terms "aristocrats" and "first families" were

heard in the community, and something of traditional Southern ampleness and generosity crept into the way of life. No one said nouveau riche in those days; the first families were the real thing. No one denied it, and misfortune could not shake or destroy them.

A panic is a great teacher of humility, and the financial depression that fell upon the country in 1873 drove the lesson home remorselessly at Indianapolis. There had been nothing equivocal about the boom. Western speculators had not always had a fifty-year-old town to operate in, the capital of a state, a natural railway centre, no arid village in a hot prairie, but a real forest city that thundered mightily in the prospectus. There was no sudden collapse; a brave effort was made to ward off the day of reckoning; but this only prolonged the agony. Among the victims there was little whimpering. A thoroughbred has not proved his mettle until he has held up his head in defeat, and the Hoosier aristocrat went down with his flag flying. A young man of this régime was reduced to accepting employment as a railroad brakeman, and he bought a silvermounted lantern with his first month's wages. Those that had suffered the proud man's contumely then came forth to sneer. An old-fashioned butternut Democrat remarked of a banker who failed, that "no wonder Blank busted when he drove to business in a carriage behind a nigger in uniform.” The memory of the hard times lingered long at home and abroad. A town where credit could be so shaken was not, the Eastern investor declared, a safe place for further investments; and in many quarters Indianapolis was not forgiven until an honest, substantial growth had carried the lines of the city beyond the terra incognita of the boom.

Many of the striking characteristics of the people are attributable to those days, when the city's bounds were moved far countryward, to the end that the

greatest possible number of investors might enjoy the ownership of town lots. The signal effect of this dark time was to stimulate thrift and bring a new era of caution and conservatism; for there is a good deal of Scotch-Irish in the Hoosier, and he cannot be fooled twice with the same bait. During the period of depression the town lost its zest for gayety. It took its pleasures a little soberly; it was notorious as a town that welcomed theatrical attractions grudgingly, though this attitude must be referred back also to the religious prejudices of the early comers. Your Indianapolitan who has personal knowledge of the panic, or who has listened to the story of it from one who weathered the storm, has never forgotten the discipline of the seventies: though he has reached the promised land he still remembers the lash of Pharaoh. So conservatism became the city's rule of life. The panic of 1893 caused scarcely a ripple, and the typical Indianapolis business man to this day is one who minds his barometer carefully.

Indianapolis was a town that became a city rather against its will. It liked its own way, and its way was slow; but when the calamity could no longer be averted, it had its trousers creased and its shoes polished, and accepted with good grace the fact that its population was approximately two hundred thousand, and that it had crept to a place comfortably near the top in the list of bank clearances. A man who left Indianapolis in 1880, returned in 1900the Indianapolitan, like the cat in the ballad, always goes back; he cannot successfully be transplanted to find himself a stranger in a strange city. Once he knew all the people who rode in chaises; but on his return he found new people abroad in smart vehicles; once he had been able to converse on topics of the day with a passing friend in the middle of Washington Street; now he must duck and dive, and keep an eye on

the policeman if he would make a safe crossing. He was asked to luncheon at a club; in the old days there were no clubs, or they were looked on as iniquitous things; he was taken to look at factories which were the largest of their kind in the world. At the railroad yards he saw machinery being loaded for shipment to Russia and Chili; he was told that books published at Indianapolis were sold in New York and Boston, Toronto and London, and he was driven over asphalt streets to parks that had not been dreamed of before his term of exile.

Manufacturing is the great business of the city. There are nearly two thousand establishments within its limits where manufacturing in some form is carried on. Many of these rose in the day of natural gas, and it was predicted that when the gas had been exhausted the city would lose them; but the number has increased steadily despite the failure of the gas supply. There are abundant coal-fields south and southwest of the city, so that the question of fuel will not soon vex manufacturers. The city enjoys, besides, the benefits to be derived from the numerous manufactories in other towns of central Indiana, many of which maintain administrative offices there. It is not only a good place in which to make things, but a point from which many things may be sold to advantage. Jobbing flourished before manufacturing became a serious factor. The jobbers have given the city an enviable reputation for enterprise and fair dealing. When you ask an Indianapolis jobber whether the propinquity of St. Louis, Cincinnati, Chicago, and Cleveland is not against him, he answers that he meets his competitors every day in many parts of the country and is not afraid of them.

Indianapolis is not like other cities of approximately the same size. It is not the native who says so, but the visitor from abroad, who is puzzled by a differ

ence between the Hoosier capital and Kansas City, Omaha, and Denver, or Minneapolis and St. Paul. It has perhaps more kinship with Cincinnati than with any other Western city. Most Western towns try to catch the step of Chicago, but Indianapolis has never suffered from any such ambition; so the Kansas City man and the Minneapolis man visit Indianapolis and find it slow, while the Baltimore or Washington or Hartford visitor wonders what there is about the Hoosier capital that reminds him of his own city.

Indianapolis is a place of industry, thrift, and comfort, and not of luxury. Its social entertainments were long of the simplest sort, and the change in this respect has come only within a few years, with the great wave of growth and prosperity that has wrought a new Indianapolis from the old. If left to itself, the old Indianapolis would never have known a horse show or a carnival, - would never have strewn itself with confetti; but the invading time-spirit is fast destroying the walls of the city of tradition. Business men no longer go home to dinner at twelve o'clock and take a nap before returning to work; and the old amiable habit of visiting for an hour in an office where ten minutes of business was to be transacted has passed. A town is at last a city when sociability has been squeezed out of business and appointments are arranged a day in advance by telephone.

The distinguishing quality of Indianapolis is its simple domesticity. The people are home-loving and home-keeping. In the early days, when the town was a rude capital in the woods, the people stayed at home perforce; and when the railroad reached them they did not take readily to travel. A trip to New York is still a much more serious event, considered from Indianapolis, than from Denver or Kansas City. It was an Omaha young man who was so little appalled by distance that, having an ex

press frank, he formed the habit of sending his laundry work to New York, to assure a certain finish to his linen that was unattainable at home. The more the Hoosier travels, the more he likes his own town. Only a little while ago an Indianapolis man who had been in New York for a week went to the theatre and saw there a fellow townsman who had just arrived. He hurried around to greet him at the end of the first act. "Tell me," he exclaimed, "how is everything in old Indianapolis?" This trifling incident is more illuminative of the characteristic qualities of the Hoosier capital than many pages of historical

narrative.

The Hoosiers assemble at Indianapolis in great throngs with slight excuse. In addition to the sixteen railroads that touch there, newly constructed interurban traction lines have lately knit new communities into sympathetic relationship with the capital. You may stand in Washington Street and read the names of all the surrounding towns on the big interurban cars that mingle with the local traction traffic. They bring men whose errand is to buy or sell, or who come to play golf on the free course at Riverside Park, or on the private grounds of the Country Club. These cars carry freight, too, and while they disfigure the streets, no one has made any serious protest, for are not the Hoosiers welcome to their capital, no matter how and when they visit it; and is not this free intercourse, as the phrase has it, "a good thing for Indianapolis"? This contact between town and country tends to keep alive a state feeling, and as the capital grows, — as, let us say, it takes on more and more a metropolitan spirit, the value of this intimacy will have an increasing value, making a neighborhood of a large area. The rural free delivery of mail is another factor to be suggested in indicating the peculiar position occupied by Indianapolis as the centre of state life. A central Indiana farmer's wife may take a news

paper from the country carrier at her own door, read the advertisement of an entertainment or bargain sale at Indianapolis, and within an hour or so she can be set down in Washington Street. The economic bearing of these changes on the country merchant is a serious matter that need only be mentioned here.

Unlike many other American cities, Indianapolis has never been dominated by a few rich men. The rich boss has never ruled it; the men of wealth there have usually possessed character as well. And when, in this frugal, cautious capital, a rich man is indicated, the term is relative in a purely local sense. It is probably fair to say that there are more large fortunes in the much smaller towns of Dayton or Columbus, Ohio, than in Indianapolis, where a quarter of a million dollars is enough to make a man conspicuously rich.

There is something neighborly and cosy about Indianapolis. The man across the street or next door will share any good thing he has with you, whether it be a cure for rheumatism, a new book, or the garden hose. It is a town where doing as one likes is not a mere possibility, but an inherent right. The only thing that is insisted on is respectability, - a black alpaca, Sunday-afternoon kind of respectability. You may, in short, be forgiven for being rich and making a display; but you must be good.

The typical citizen is still one who is well satisfied with his own hearth, who takes his business seriously on week days, and goes to church on Sundays, that he may gain grace by which to view tolerantly his profane neighbor of the new order who spends Sunday at the Country Club. The woman of Indianapolis is not afraid to venture abroad with her market basket, albeit she may ride in a carriage. The public market at Indianapolis is an ancient and honorable institution, and there is no shame and much honor in being seen there in conversation with the farmer and the

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gardener or the seller of herbs, in the early hours of the morning. The market is so thoroughly established in public affection that the society reporter walks its aisles in pursuit of news. true Indianapolis housewife goes to market; the mere resident of the city orders by telephone, and takes what the grocer has to offer; and herein lies a difference that is not half so superficial as it may sound, for at heart the people who are related to the history and tradition of Indianapolis are simple and frugal, and if they read Emerson and Browning by the evening lamp, they know no reason why they should not distinguish, the next morning, between the yellow-legged chicken offered by the farmer's wife at the market and frozen fowls of doubtful authenticity that have been held for a season in cold storage.

The narrow margin between the great parties in Indiana has made the capital a centre of incessant political activity. The geographical position of the city has also contributed to this, the state leaders and managers being constant visitors. Every second man you meet is a statesman; every third man is an orator. The largest social club in Indianapolis exacts a promise of fidelity to the Republican party, and within its portals chances and changes of men and measures are discussed tirelessly. And the pilgrim from abroad is not bored with talk of local affairs; not a bit of it! The nation's future is at once disclosed to him. If, however, he wishes to obtain a Godkinian forecast, he can be accommodated at the University Club grillroom, where a court of destructive critics meets daily at high noon. The presence in the city, through many years, of men of national prominence Morton, Harrison, Hendricks, McDonald, English, Gresham - further helped to make Indianapolis a political centre. Geography plays a chief part in the distribution of favors by state nominating conventions. Rivalry between the smaller towns is not

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