Of the three, Rochester is the most distinctive; one of the most distinctive of all our American towns and hence chosen as the chief subject for this chapter. But Buffalo is the largest, and Syracuse the most ingenious, so they are not to be ignored. Rochester is conservative. Rochester proves her conservatism by her smart clubs, and the general cultivation of her inhabitants. Certain excellent persons there, like certain excellent persons in Charleston, frown upon newspaper reports of their social activities. In Syracuse, on the contrary, the Sunday newspapers have columns of "society notes" and the reporters who go to dances and receptions prove their industry by writing long lists of the "among those present." Buffalo leans more to Syracuse custom in this regard. Rochester scans rather critically the man who comes to dwell there--unless he comes labeled with letters of introduction. In Syracuse and in Buffalo, too, there is more of a spirit of _camaraderie_. A man is taken into good society there because of what he is, rather than for that from which he may have sprung. So it may be said that Syracuse and Buffalo breathe the spirit of the West in their social life, while Rochester clings firmly to the conservatism of the East. Indeed, her citizens rather like to call her "the Boston of the West," just as the man from the Missouri Bottoms called the real Boston "the Omaha of the East." Take these cities separately and their personality becomes the more pertinent and compelling. Consider them one by one as a traveler sees them on a westbound train of the New York Central railroad--Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo--and in the same grading they increase in population; roughly speaking, in a geometrical ratio. Syracuse has a little more than a hundred thousand inhabitants, Rochester is about twice her size and Buffalo is about twice the size of Rochester. [Illustration: The Erie Canal still finds an amiable path through Rochester] Each of them is the result of the Erie canal. There had been famous post-roads across central and western New York before DeWitt Clinton dug his great ditch, and the Mohawk valley together with the little known "lake country" of New York formed one of the earliest passage-ways to the West. But the Erie canal, providing a water level from the Great Lakes to the Hudson river and so to the Atlantic, was a tremendous impulse to the state of New York. Small towns grew apace and the three big towns were out of their swaddling clothes and accounted as cities almost before they realized it. The building of the railroads across the state and their merging into great systems was a second step in their transition, while the third can hardly be said to be completed--the planning and construction of a network of inter-urban electric lines that shall again unite the three and--what is far more important to each--bring a great territory of small cities, villages and rich farms into closer touch with them.