Perhaps there was no town of its size and wealth in Christendom which had less of the higher intellectual life and less of an enlightened public spirit than Cincinnati before the war. It had become exceedingly rich. Early in its career the great difficulty and expense of transporting goods across the mountains and down the winding Ohio had forced the people into manufacturing, and Cincinnati became the great workshop, as well as the exchange, of the vast and populous valley of the Ohio. Its wealth was legitimately earned. It was Cincinnati which originated and perfected the system which packs fifteen bushels of corn into a pig, and packs that pig into a barrel, and sends him over the mountains and over the ocean to feed mankind. Cincinnati imported or made nearly all that the people of three or four States could afford to buy, and received from them nearly all that they could spare in return, and made a profit on both transactions. This business, upon the whole, was done honestly and well. Immense fortunes were made. Nicholas Longworth died worth twelve millions, and there are now in that young city sixty-four persons whose estate is rated at a million dollars or more. But, with all this wealth and this talent for business, the people of Cincinnati displayed little of that spirit of improvement which has converted Chicago, in thirty years, from a quagmire into a beautiful city, and made it accessible to all the people of the prairies. There was too much ballast, as it were, for so little sail. People were intent on their own affairs, and were satisfied if their own business prospered. Such a thing even as a popular lecture was rare, and a well-sustained course of lectures was felt to be out of the question. Books of the higher kind were in little demand (that is, little, considering the size and great wealth of the place); there was little taste for art; few concerts were given, and there was no drama fit to entertain intellectual persons. Cincinnati was the Old Hunkers' paradise. Separated from a Slave State only by a river one third of a mile wide, with her leading families connected by marriage with those of Virginia, Kentucky, and Maryland, and her business men having important relations with the South, there was no city--not even Baltimore--that was more saturated with the spirit of Hunkerism,--that horrid blending of vanity and avarice which made the Northern people equal sharers in the guilt of slavery, while taking the lion's share of the profit. It was at Cincinnati, in 1836, that a mob of most respectable citizens, having first "resolved" in public meeting that "Abolition papers" should neither be "published nor distributed" in the town, broke into the office of James G. Birney's "Philanthropist," and scattered the types, and threw the press into the river. It was at Cincinnati, in 1841, that the authorities were compelled to fill the prisons with negroes to protect them from massacre. Similar scenes have occurred in other