sudden shoots, of jets, of spray. From the “caldron” itself, into which we can hardly see, rises a column of rainbow-tinted mist, backed by distant ranges and black woods, now fast falling before the settler‘s axe. Below you is the river, swift, and covered with cream-like foam; on the right, a gorge – the mouth of the Rideau Canal.
When surveyed from the fittest points, the Chaudière is but little behind Niagara; but it may be doubted whether in any fall there is that which can be called sublimity. Natural causes are too evident; water, rushing to find its level, falls from a ledge of rock. How different from a storm upon the coast, or from a September sunset, where the natural causes are so remote that you can bring yourself almost to see the immediate hand of God! It is excusable in Americans, who have no sea-coast worthy of the name, to talk of Niagara as the perfection of the sublime; but it is strange that a people who have Birling Gap and Bantry Bay should allow themselves to be led by such a cry.
Niagara has one beauty in which it is unapproached by the great Chaudière: the awesome slowness with which the deep-green flood, in the center of the Horseshoe Fall, rolls rather than plunges into the gulf.
CHAPTER VII.
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
FROM the gloom of Buffalo, the smoke of Cincinnati, and the dirt of Pittsburg, I should have been glad to escape as soon as might be, even had not the death from cholera of 240 persons in a single day of my visit to the “Queen City” warned me to fly north. From a stricken town, with its gutters full of chloride of lime, and fires burning in the public streets, to green Michigan, was a grateful change; but I was full of sorrow at leaving that richest and most lovely of all States – Ohio. There is a charm in the park-like beauty of the Monongahela valley, dotted with vines and orchards, that nothing in Eastern America can rival. The absence at once of stumps in the cornfields, and of untilled or unfenced land, gives the “Buckeye State” a look of age that none of the “old Eastern States” can show. In corn, in meadow, in timber-land, Ohio stands alone. Her indian-corn exceeds in richness that of any other State; she has ample stores of iron, and coal is worked upon the surface in every Alleghany valley. Wool, wine, hops, tobacco, all are raised; her Catawba has inspired poems. Every river-side is clothed with groves of oak, of hickory, of sugar-maple, of sycamore, of poplar, and of buckeye. Yet, as I said, the change to the Michigan prairie was full of a delightful relief; it was Holland after the Rhine, London after Paris.
Where men grow tall there will maize grow tall, is a good sound rule: limestone makes both bone and straw. The Northwestern States, inhabited by giant men, are the chosen home of the most useful and beautiful of plants, the maize – in America called “corn.” For hundreds of miles the railway track, protected not even by a fence or hedge, runs through the towering plants, which hide all prospects save that of their own green pyramids. Maize feeds the people, it feeds the cattle and the hogs that they export to feed the cities of the East; from it is made yearly, as an Ohio farmer told me, “whisky enough to float the ark.” Rice is not more the support of the Chinese than maize of the English in America.
In the great corn-field of the Northwestern States, dwells a people without a history, without tradition, busy at hewing out of the forest trunks codes and social usages of its own. The Kansas men have set themselves to emancipating women; the “Wolverines,” as the people of Michigan are called, have turned their heads to education, and are teaching the teachers upon this point.
The rapidity with which intellectual activity is awakened in the West is inexplicable to the people of New England. While you are admiring the laws of Minnesota and Wisconsin, Boston men tell you that the resemblance of the code of Kansas to that of Connecticut is consequent only on the fact, that the framers of the former possessed a copy of this one New England code, while they had never set eyes upon the code of any other country in the world. While Yale and Harvard are trying in vain to keep pace with the State universities of Michigan and Kansas, you will meet in Lowell and New Haven men who apply an old Russian story to the Western colleges, and tell you that their professors of languages, when asked where they have studied, reply that they guess they learned to read and write in Springfield.
One of the difficulties of the New England colleges has been to reconcile university traditions with democracy; but in the Western States there is neither reconciliation nor tradition, though universities are plenty. Probably the most democratic school in the whole world is the State University of Michigan, situate at Ann Arbor, near Detroit. It is cheap, large, practical; twelve hundred students, paying only the ten dollars entrance fee, and five dollars a year during residence, and living where they can in the little town, attend the university to be prepared to enter with knowledge and resolution upon the affairs of their future life. A few only are educated by having their minds unfolded that they may become many-sided men; but all work with spirit, and with that earnestness which is seen in the Scotch universities at home. The war with crime, the war with sin, the war with death – Law, Theology, Medicine – these are the three foremost of man‘s employments; to these, accordingly, the university affords her chiefest care, and to one of these the student, his entrance examination passed, often gives his entire time.
These things are democratic, but it is not in them that the essential democracy of the university is to be seen. There are at Michigan no honor-lists, no classes in our sense, no orders of merit, no competition. A man takes, or does not take a certain degree. The university is governed, not by its members, not by its professors, but by a parliament of “regents” appointed by the inhabitants of the State. Such are the two great principles of the democratic university of the West.
It might be supposed that these two strange departures from the systems of older universities were irregularities, introduced to meet the temporary embarrassments incidental to educational establishments in young States. So far is this from being the case that, as I saw at Cambridge, the clearest-sighted men of the older colleges of America are trying to assimilate their teaching system to that of Michigan – at least in the one point of the absence of competition. They assert that toil performed under the excitement of a fierce struggle between man and man is unhealthy work, different in nature and in results from the loving labor of men whose hearts are really in what they do: toil, in short, not very easily distinguishable from slave labor.
In the matter of the absence of competition, Michigan is probably but returning to the system of the European universities of the Middle Ages, but the government by other than the members of the university is a still stranger scheme. It is explained when we look to the sources whence the funds of the university are drawn – namely, from the pockets of the taxpayers of the State. The men who have set up this corporation in their midst, and who tax themselves for its support, cannot be called on, they say, to renounce its government to their nominees, professors from New England, unconnected with the State, men of one idea, often quarrelsome, sometimes “irreligious.” There is much truth in these statements of the case, but it is to be hoped that the men chosen to serve as “regents” are of a higher intellectual stamp than those appointed to educational offices in the Canadian backwoods. A report was put into my hands at Ottawa, in which a superintendent of instruction writes to the Minister of Education, that he had advised the ratepayers of Victoria County not in future to elect as school trustees men who cannot read or write. As Michigan grows older, she will, perhaps, seek to conform to the practice of other universities in this matter of her government, but in the point of absence of competition she is likely to continue firm.
Even here some difficulty is found in getting competent school directors; one of them reported 31½ children attending school. Of another district its superintendent reports: “Conduct of scholars about the same as that of ‘Young America’ in general.” Some of the superintendents aim at jocosity, and show no want of talent in themselves, while their efforts are to demonstrate its deficiency among the boys. The superintendent of Grattan says, in answer to some numbered questions: “Condition good, improvement fair; for ¼ of ¼ of the year in school, and fifteen-sixteenths of the time at play. Male teachers most successful with the birch; female with Cupid‘s darts. Schoolhouses in fair whittling order. Apparatus: Shovel,
