We sometimes speak of "the Western cities," as though the word "Western" was sufficiently descriptive, and as though the cities west of the Alleghany Mountains were all alike. This is far from being the case. Every city in the Western country, as well as every State, county, and neighborhood, has a character of its own, derived chiefly from the people who settled it. Berlin is not more different from Vienna, Lyons is not more different from Marseilles, Birmingham is not more different from Liverpool, than Cincinnati is from Chicago or St. Louis; and all these differences date back to the origin of those cities. The Ohio, formed by the junction of two Pennsylvania rivers, is the natural western outlet for the redundant population of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and consequently the first twenty thousand inhabitants of Cincinnati were chiefly from those States,--honest, plodding, saving Protestants, with less knowledge and less public spirit than the people of New England. The Swedes, the Danes, the Germans, the Protestant Irish, who poured into Pennsylvania and New Jersey in Franklin's time, attracted by the perfect toleration established by William Penn, were excellent people; but they had not the activity of mind nor the spiritual life of the English Puritans. Shrewd calculators and of indomitable industry, they were more able to accumulate property than disposed to risk it in bold, far-reaching enterprises, and took more pride in possessing than in displaying wealth,--in having a large barn than an attractive residence. They were more certain to build a church than a school-house, and few of them wanted anything of the book-pedler except an almanac. The descendants of such men founded Cincinnati, and made it a thriving, bustling, dull, unintellectual place. Then came in a spice of Yankees to enliven the mass, to introduce some quickening heresies, to promote schools, to found libraries, to establish new manufactures and stimulate public improvements. That wondrous tide of Germans followed that has made in each of the cities of the West a populous German quarter,--a town within a town. Meanwhile, young men from the Southern States, in considerable numbers, settled in Cincinnati, between whom and the daughters of the rich "Hunkers" of the town marriages were frequent, and the families thus created were, from 1830 to 1861, the reigning power in the city.