so marked as their united stand against the capital. The city has had, at least twice, both United States Senators; but governors have usually been summoned from the country. Harrison was defeated for governor by a farmer (1876), in a heated campaign, in which "Kid-Gloved Harrison" was held up to derision by the adherents of "Blue Jeans Williams." And again, in 1880, a similar situation was presented in the contest for the same office between Albert G. Porter and Franklin Landers, both of Indianapolis, though Landers stood for the rural "Blue Jeans" idea.

man.

The high tide of political interest was reached in the summer and fall of 1888, when Harrison made his campaign for the presidency, largely from his own doorstep. For a man who was reckoned cold by acquaintances, his candidacy evoked an enthusiasm at home that was a marked tribute to Mr. Harrison's distinguished ability as a lawyer and statesThe people of Indiana did not love him, perhaps, but they had an immense admiration for his talents. Morton was a masterful and dominating leader; Hendricks was gracious and amiable; while Gresham was singularly magnetic and more independent in his opinions than his contemporaries. William H. English had been a member of Congress from a southern Indiana district before removing to Indianapolis, and an influential member of the constitutional convention of 1850. He was throughout his life a painstaking student of public affairs. When he became his party's candidate for Vice President on the ticket with Hancock in 1880, much abuse and ridicule were directed against him on account of his wealth; but he was a man of rugged native force, who stood stubbornly for old-fashioned principles of government, and labored to uphold them. Harrison was the most intellectual of the group, and he had, as few Americans have ever had, the gift of vigorous and polished speech. He did not win men by ease of

intercourse, or drive them by force of personality, but he instructed and convinced them, through an appeal to reason and without the lure of specious oratory. He stood finely as a type of what was best in the old and vanishing Indianapolis,for the domestic and home-loving element that dominated the city from its beginning practically to the end of the last century.

The spirit of independence that gained a footing in the Blaine campaign of 1884 came to stay. Marion County, of which Indianapolis is the seat, was for many years Republican; but neither county nor city has for a decade been "safely" Democratic or Republican. There is a considerable body of independent voters, and they have rebuked incompetence, indifference, and vice repeatedly and drastically; and they have resented the effort often made to introduce national issues into local affairs. At the city election held in October, 1903, a Democrat was elected mayor over a Republican candidate who had been renominated in a "snap" convention, in the face of aggressive opposition within his party. The issue was tautly drawn between corruption and vice on the one hand and law and order on the other. An independent candidate, who had also the Prohibition support, received over 5000 votes. In this connection it may be said that the Indianapolis public schools owe their marked excellence and efficiency to their complete divorcement from political influence. This has not only assured the public an intelligent and honest expenditure of school funds, and the provision is generous,

but it has created a corps spirit among the city's 750 teachers, admirable in itself, and tending to cumulative benefits not yet realized. A supervising teacher

a woman -was lately offered a like position in another city at double the salary paid her at Indianapolis, and she declined merely because of the security of her tenure. The superintendent of

schools has absolute power of appointment, and he is accountable only to the commissioners, and they in turn are entirely independent of the mayor and other city officers. Positions on the school board are not sought by politicians. The incumbents serve without pay, and the public evince a disposition to find good men and keep them in office. The soldiers' monument at Indianapolis, which testifies to the patriotism and sacrifice of the Indiana soldier and sailor, is a testimony also to the deep impression made by the civil war on the people of the state. The monument is to Indianapolis what the Washington Monument is to the national capital. The incoming traveler sees it afar, and within the city it is almost an inescapable thing. It stands in a circular plaza that was originally a park known as the Governor's Circle. This was long ago abandoned as a site for the governor's mansion, but it offered an ideal spot for a monument to Indiana soldiers, when, in 1887, the General Assembly authorized its construction. The height of the monument from the street level is 284 feet, and it stands on a stone terrace 110 feet in diameter. The shaft is crowned by a statue of Victory thirty-eight feet high. It is built throughout of Indiana limestone. The fountains at the base, the heroic sculptured groups "War" and Peace," and the bronze astragals representing the army and navy, are ad mirable in design and execution. The whole effect is one of poetic beauty and power. There is nothing cheap, tawdry, or commonplace in this magnificent tribute of Indiana to her soldiers. The monument is a memorial of the soldiers of all the wars in which Indiana has participated. The veterans of the civil war protested against this, and the controversy was long and bitter; but the capture of Vincennes from the British in 1779 is made to link Indiana to the war of the Revolution; and the battle of Tippecanoe, to the war of 1812. The

five Indiana regiments contributed to the American army in the war with Mexico, and 7400 men enlisted for the Spanish war are remembered. It is, however, the war of the Rebellion, whose effect on the social and political life of Indiana was so tremendous, that gives the monument its great cause for being. The population of Indiana in 1860 was 1,350,000; the total enlistment of soldiers and sailors during the ensuing years of war was 210,497; and the names of these men lie safe for posterity in the base of the gray shaft.

A good deal of humor has in recent years been directed toward Indiana as a literary centre, but Indianapolis as a village boasted writers of at least local reputation, and Coggeshall's Poets and Poetry of the West (1867) attributes half-a-dozen poets to the Hoosier capital. The Indianapolis press has been distinguished always by enterprise and decency, and in several instances by vigorous independence. The literary quality of the city's newspapers was high, even in the early days, and the standard has not been lowered. Poets with cloaks and canes were, in the eighties, pretty prevalent in Market Street near the Post Office, the habitat then of most of the newspapers. The poets read their verses to one another and cursed the magazines. A reporter on one of the papers, who had scored the triumph of a poem in the Atlantic, was a man of mark among the guild for years. The local wits stabbed the fledgeling bards with their gentle ironies. A young woman of social prominence printed some verses in an Indianapolis newspaper, and one of her acquaintances, when asked for his opinion of them, said they were creditable and ought to be set to music, and played as an instrumental piece! The wide popularity attained by Mr. James Whitcomb Riley quickened the literary impulse, and the fame of his elders and predecessors suffered severely from the fact that he did not belong to the cloaked

brigade. General Lew. Wallace never lived at Indianapolis save for a few years in boyhood, while his father was governor, though he has in recent years spent his winters there. Maurice Thompson's muse scorned "paven ground," and he was little known at the capital even during his term of office as state geologist, when he came to town frequently from Crawfordsville, the home of General Wallace also. Mr. Booth Tarkington, a native of the city, has lifted the banner anew for a younger generation.

If you do not meet an author at every corner, you are at least never safe from the man that reads books. In a Missouri River town, a stranger must listen to the old wail against the railroads; at Indianapolis he must listen to politics, and possibly some one will ask his opinion of a sonnet, just as though it were a cigar. A judge of the United States Court, sitting at Indianapolis, was for ever locking the door of his private of fice, to the end that some attorney, calling on business, might listen to an Horatian ode. There was indeed a time consule Planco when most of the Federal office-holders at Indianapolis were bookish men. Three successive clerks of the Federal courts were scholars; the pension agent was an enthusiastic Shakespearean; the district attorney was a poet, and the master of chancery a man of varied learning, who was so good a talker that, when he met Lord Chief Justice Coleridge abroad, the English jurist took the Hoosier with him on circuit, and wrote to the justice of the American Supreme Court who had introduced them, to "send me another man as good."

It is possible for a community which may otherwise lack a true local spirit to be unified through the possession of a sense of humor; and even in periods of financial depression the town has always enjoyed the saving grace of a cheerful, centralized intelligence. The first tavern philosophers stood for this, and the

courts of the early times were touched with it, as witness all western chronicles. The middle western people are preeminently humorous, particularly those of the Southern strain from which Lincoln sprang. During all the years that the Hoosier suffered the reproach of the outside world, the citizen of the capital never failed to appreciate the joke when it was on himself; and, looking forth from the wicket of the city gate, he was still more keenly appreciative when it was on his neighbors. The Hoosier is a natural story-teller; he relishes a joke, and to talk is his ideal of social enjoyment. This was true of the early Hoosier, and it is true to-day of his successor at the capital. The Monday night meetings of the Indianapolis Literary Club

organized in 1877 and with a continuous existence to this time-have been marked by bright talk. The original members are nearly all gone; but the sayings of a group of them the stiletto thrusts of Fishback, the lawyer; the droll inadvertences of Livingston Howland, the judge; and the inimitable anecdotes of Myron Reed, soldier and preacher - crept beyond the club's walls and became town property. This club is old and well seasoned. It is exclusive,

so much so that one of its luminaries remarked that if all of its members should be expelled for any reason, none could hope to be readmitted. It has entertained but four pilgrims from the outer world, Matthew Arnold, Dean Farrar, Joseph Parker, and John Fiske.

The Hoosier capital has always been susceptible to the charms of oratory. Most of the great lecturers in the golden age of the American lyceum were welcomed cordially at Indianapolis. The Indianapolis pulpit has been served by many able men, and great store is still set by preaching. When Henry Ward Beecher ministered to the congregation of the Second Presbyterian Church (1838-46), his superior talents were recognized and appreciated. He gave a

series of seven lectures to the young men of the city during the winter of 1843-44, on such subjects as Industry, Gamblers and Gambling, Popular Amusements, etc., which were published at Indianapolis immediately, in response to an urgent request signed by thirteen prominent men of the city and state.

The women of Indianapolis have aided grey in fashioning the city into an enlightened community. The wives and daughters of the founders were often women of cultivation, and much in the character of the city to-day is plainly traceable to their work and example. During the civil war they did valiant service in caring for the Indiana soldier. The Indiana Sanitary Commission was the first organization of its kind in the United States. The women of Indianapolis built for themselves in 1888 a building the Propylæum-where many clubs meet; and they have been the mainstay of the Indianapolis Art Association, which, by a generous and unexpected bequest a few years ago, is now able to build a permanent museum and school on the charming site of an old homestead. It is worth remembering

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The citizens like their Indianapolis, and with reason. It is a place of charm and vigor, the charm and ease of contentment dating from the old days, mingled with the earnest challenge and robust faith of to-day. Here you have an admirable instance of the secure building of an American city with remarkably little alien influence, a city of sound credit abroad, which offers on its commercial and industrial sides a remarkable variety of opportunities. It is a city that brags less of its freight tonnage than of its public schools; but it is proud of both. At no time in its history has it been indifferent to the best thought and achievement of the world; and what it has found good it has secured for its own. A kindly, generous, hospitable people are these of this Western capital, finely representative of the product of democracy as democracy has exerted its many forces and disciplines in the broad, rich Ohio Valley.

Meredith Nicholson.

IT is a pity that we cannot get on without definitions, but there is too much convenience in them, too much safety. They accoutre us, they marshal us the way that we are going, they help us along the difficult middle path of argument, they comfort our declining periods. Poor relations, to be sure, and not to be made too much of; but, at least, one ought not to be ashamed of them in company. If there are abstract terms which can safely be employed offhand, the terms of literary criticism are hardly among them. What wonder?

If political economists find it hard to determine the meaning of words like "money" and "property," how shall critics agree in defining such imponderable objects as genius, art, literature? Is literature broadly "the printed word," the whole body of recorded speech? Or is it the product of a conscious and regulated, but not inspired, art? Or is it, with other products of art, due to that expression of personality through craftsmanship which we call genius? To the last put question I should say yes; confessing faith in personal inspiration as

the essential force in literature, and in the relative rather than absolute character of such personal inspiration, or genius. I think of literature not as ceasing to exist beyond the confines of poetry and belles-lettres, but as embracing whatever of the printed word presents, in any degree, a personal interpretation of life. What he is and has, - some touch of genius, some property of wisdom, some hold (however partial and unconscious) upon the principles of literary art, these things enable a writer for interpretative or "creative" work.

I.

From this point of view journalism has, strictly, no literary aspect; it has certain contacts with literature, and that is all. The real business of journalism is to record or to comment, not to create or to interpret. In its exercise of the recording function it is a useful trade, and in its commenting office it takes rank as a profession; but it is never an art. As a trade it may apply rules, as a profession it may enforce conventions; it cannot embody principles of universal truth and beauty as art embodies them. It is essentially impersonal, in spirit and in method. A journalist cannot, as a journalist, speak wholly for himself; he would be like the occasional private citizen who nominates himself for office. A creator of literature is his own candidate, his own caucus, his own argument, and his own elector. It is aut Cæsar aut nullus with him, as with the aspirant in any other form of art. This is why an unsuccessful author is so much more conspicuous an object of ridicule than other failures. He has proposed himself for a sort of eminence, and has proved to be no better than a Christian or an ordinary man. He might, perhaps, have been useful in some more practical way, for instance, in journalism, which offers a respectable maintenance, at least, to the possessor of verbal talent. Its ex parte impersonality af

fords him a surer foothold at the outset. Pure journalism has no need of genius; it is an enterprise, not an emprise. It records fact, and on the basis of such fact utters the opinion of partisan consensus, of editorial policy, or, at its point of nearest approach to literature, of individual intelligence.)

But it happens that pure journalism is hardly more common than pure literature. The "spark of genius" is, one must think, more than a metaphor. If it did not often appear in writers whose principal conscious effort is given to the utilization of talent, there would be no question of anything more than contrast between literature and journalism. There is a mood in which every thoughtful reader or writer is sure to sympathize with a favorite speculation of the late Sir Leslie Stephen's. "I rather doubt," he expressed it not long ago in the pages of the Atlantic, "whether the familiar condemnation of mediocre poetry should not be extended to mediocrity in every branch of literature. . . . The world is the better, no doubt, even for an honest crossing-sweeper. But I often think that the value of second-rate literature is not small, but - simply If one does not profess to be a genius, is it not best to console one's self with the doctrine that silence is golden, and take, if possible, to the spade or the pickaxe, leaving the pen to one's betters?"

zero.

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One's betters, it is, after all, an indefinite phrase. Are they only the best? Attempts to establish an accurate ranking of genius have proved idle enough. It is not altogether agreed whether the greatest names can be counted on the fingers of one hand or of two; it is fairly well understood that they are worth all the other names "put together." But does it follow that all the other names are, therefore, worth nothing? The foothills have never been quite put to shame by the loftiest summits. I do not see that it is altogether admirable, this in