s. 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.

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 hi