Studies in the South and West, with Comments on CanadaWarner, Charles Dudley
History
Studies in the South and West, with Comments on Canada
Warner, Charles Dudley
Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
Social life is, speaking generally, as unformed, unselected, as the
city—that is, more fluid and undetermined than in Eastern large cities.
That is merely to say, however, that while it is American, it is young.
When you come to individuals, the people in society are largely from
the East, or have Eastern connections that determine their conduct. For
twenty years the great universities, Harvard, Yale, Amherst, Princeton,
and the rest, have been pouring in their young men here. There is no
better element in the world, and it is felt in every pulse of the town.
Young couples marry and come here from every sort of Eastern circle. But
the town has grown so fast, and so many new people have come into the
ability suddenly to spend money in fine houses and equipages, that the
people do not know each other. You may drive past miles of good houses,
with a man who has grown up with the town, who cannot tell you who any
of the occupants of the houses are. Men know each other on change, in
the courts, in business, and are beginning to know each other in clubs,
but society has not got itself sorted out and arranged, or discovered
its elements. This is a metropolitan trait, it is true, but the
condition is socially very different from what it is in New York or
Boston; the small village associations survive a little yet, struggling
against the territorial distances, but the social mass is still
unorganized, although “society” is a prominent feature in the
newspapers. Of course it is understood that there are people “in
society,” and dinners, and all that, in nowise different from the same
people and events the world over.
A striking feature of the town is “youth,” visible in social life as
well as in business. An Eastern man is surprised to see so many young
men in responsible positions, at the head, or taking the managing oar,
in great moneyed institutions, in railway corporations, and in societies
of charity and culture. A young man, graduate of the city high-school,
is at the same time president of a prominent bank, president of the
Board of Trade, and president of the Art Institute. This youthful spirit
must be contagious, for apparently the more elderly men do not permit
themselves to become old, either in the business or the pleasures of
life. Everything goes on with youthful vim and spirit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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