Louis to address some gathering at the
Exposition; and Mrs. Hay bade Adams go with them, for whatever
use he could suppose himself to serve. He professed the religion
of World's Fairs, without which he held education to be a blind
impossibility; and obeyed Mrs. Hay's bidding the more readily
because it united his two educations in one; but theory and
practice were put to equally severe test at St. Louis. Ten years
had passed since he last crossed the Mississippi, and he found
everything new. In this great region from Pittsburgh through Ohio
and Indiana, agriculture had made way for steam; tall chimneys
reeked smoke on every horizon, and dirty suburbs filled with
scrap-iron, scrap-paper and cinders, formed the setting of every
town. Evidently, cleanliness was not to be the birthmark of the
new American, but this matter of discards concerned the measure
of force little, while the chimneys and cinders concerned it so
much that Adams thought the Secretary of State should have rushed
to the platform at every station to ask who were the people; for
the American of the prime seemed to be extinct with the Shawnee
and the buffalo.
The subject grew quickly delicate. History told little about
these millions of Germans and Slavs, or whatever their
race-names, who had overflowed these regions as though the Rhine
and the Danube had turned their floods into the Ohio.
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