s is clear to all
who have sought the facts. Whether she will ever become a manufacturing
city is a question that must be settled by the citizens themselves.
Whoever doubts that the growth of skilled labor here will be an
indispensable condition of the higher growth that is sought fails to
understand modern civilization, and should not have survived the days
when things began nowhere and ended in nothing. The old thoroughbred
Washingtonian will never invest a dollar to build a railroad or a modern
workshop, of course. He does not know anything about them, and does not
want to. His idea of business is to get real estate, and "hold on" till
somebody else makes it valuable. Gentlemen of new Washington, Hercules
will stand idle till he sees your own shoulders at the wheel. When you
shall have the faithful, enlightened manual labor of New England, you
may expect such flowers as Yale and Harvard and the aesthetic fruits they
enfold. You may be unable to see any intimate connection between such
labor and such culture, but nevertheless it exists. Old Washington could
not see it, and now you are compelled to bury old Washington out of
sight. It is time for Mohammed to start if he wants his mountain.

There are a few business-men in Washington who are as enlightened, as
liberal, as trustworthy as any in the country; and abundant is their
reward. There are a few who deal only in good wares, who always sell
them at a reasonable profit, who believe that any kind of deception is a
blunder, who manage their establishments with economy, who are aware
that the more money they permit their customers to make the more they
will ultimately make themselves,--who, in short, have learned the
principles of business and have the character to stand by them. But so
many fall short--often through ignorance--in one or more of these
respects that the average business character is low. If a lady wishes to
spend twenty-five dollars in shopping, she can generally travel eighty
miles--to Baltimore and back--and save enough of that small sum to pay
her for going, besides being sure of finding what she wants. The
Washington shopkeepers may really think that they cannot help this. They
_must_ help it, or consent to be soon shoved aside by those who can.
Instead of being troubled by the sight of his best customers going as
far as New York whenever they have anything of consequence to buy, the
genuine old Washington retailer seems to take a calm satisfaction i