And this highway of plates across the empire of New France gives but suggestion of the meagerest fraction of the fruitage of the planting of the leaden plates or the grafting of the arms of France upon the trees along the Ohio—forty pounds of iron, it has been estimated by one graphic statistician, for every man, woman, and child on the globe to-day, [Footnote: H. N. Casson. United States produces thirty million tons annually, Pennsylvania eleven and a quarter million. "Mineral Resources," 1912.] and I do not know how much tin. And, in a sense, all from a small box or crate of plates made of lead—six, eight, or more in number, eleven inches long, seven inches wide, and one eighth of an inch thick, and engraved with an inscription—one of which was found not long ago, by some lads, protruding from the bank of one of the tributary rivers! The inscription ran (in translation):

"Year 1749, in the reign of Louis XV., King of France, We, Celoron, commanding the detachment sent by the Marquis De la Galissoniere, Commander General of New France, to restore tranquillity in certain villages of these cantons, have buried this plate at [here is inserted the name of the tributary at its confluence with the Ohio] this [date] as a token of renewal of possession heretofore taken of the aforesaid river, Ohio, of all streams that fall into it, and all lands on both sides to the sources of the aforesaid streams, as the preceding Kings of France enjoyed it, or ought to have enjoyed it, and which they have upheld by force of arms and by treaties, notably by those of Ryswick, Utrecht, and Aix la Chapelle."

And with these plates (to be buried at the confluences of the important rivers along the way) were carried sheets of tin—of white iron—on which the arms of France had been stamped, to be nailed to trees above the places of the plates.

"As the Kings of France enjoyed it, or ought to have enjoyed it"—what a blight of regret was in the very seed that in its flower of to-day makes one wish for some delicate beauty or subtle fragrance that is not there, because the Kings of France did not let France enjoy it.

One can but pause here again, as I have paused many, many times in the preparation of these chapters, to ask what would have been the result if France had but chosen as Portia's successful suitor in Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice" when he was confronted with the caskets of gold, silver, and lead—had but chosen "to owe and hazard all for lead," instead of deciding as did the Prince of Morocco, the other suitor, that "a golden mind stoops not to shows of dross"—if France had hazarded all for the holding and settling of those regions whose worth was symbolized in those unpromising pieces of lead planted in the fertile soil of Louisiana, Michigan, and Ohio along the watercourses, rather than in the caskets of gold and silver sought among the mountains—if Louis XV, throwing dice at Versailles in the valley of the Seine, as Parkman describes him, with his piles of louis d'or before him, and the princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses and courtiers about him, had but followed the advice of Marquis de la Galissonniere, the humpbacked governor-general of Canada, who furnished Celoron with his leaden seeds and appointed the place of the sowing—if Louis XV had but answered his Canadian governor's prayer and sent French peasants where the plates were buried, or had even let those who wanted to flee to that valley, as they would have fled by tens of thousands, preferring the hardships and privations of the pioneer to the galleys, the dungeons, or the gallows—then "Versailles" in that valley of the Ohio would not be merely what it is, a ward or township in a city that bears the name of a British statesman.

"Or, if soldiers had been sent!" Parkman, approaching the great valley in imagination with Celoron, from the north, exclaims, "the most momentous and far-reaching question ever brought to issue on this continent was: 'Shall France remain here or shall she not?' If by diplomacy or war she had preserved but the half or less than half of her American possessions, then a barrier would have been set to the spread of the English-speaking races, there would have been no Revolutionary War and, for a long time at least, no independence." [Footnote: Parkman, "Montcalm and Wolfe," p. 5.] (Which but emphasizes what I have said as to the part, the negative part as well as the positive, France conspicuously and unconsciously played in the making of a new nation.)

If "the French soldiers left dead on inglorious continental battle-fields could," as Parkman says, "have saved Canada, and perhaps made good her claim to the vast territories of the West," [Footnote: Parkman, "Montcalm and Wolfe," p. 41.] could they after all have done more for the world than those who, in effect, sacrificed their lives on glorious western battle- fields for the United States?

A little way back I spoke of the first expedition looking toward that valley from the Atlantic side of the Alleghanies—the expedition of the "Knights of the Golden Horseshoe"—and of its vain threats. In 1748 a company of still wider horizon was formed in Virginia, George Washington's father being a member of it. It was known as the Ohio Land Company and derived its transmontane rights through George II from John Cabot, an Italian under English commission, who may have set foot nearly two centuries before somewhere on the coast of North America below Labrador, and from a very expansive interpretation of a treaty with the Indians at Lancaster, Pa., in 1744, the trans-Alleghany Indians protesting, however, not less firmly than the French, that the lands purchased by the English under that treaty extended no farther toward the sunset than the laurel hills on the western edge of the Alleghanies.

News of this Virginia corporate enterprise was willingly carried, it is surmised, by jealous Pennsylvanians and hostile French, till it reached Montreal, and so it was that Celoron was despatched with his little company to bury "Monuments of the Renewal of Possession" by France.

It was a significant and rather solemn, but most picturesque, processional that this chevalier of St. Louis led from Montreal through one thousand two hundred leagues of journey by water and land to the mouth of the Miami River and back. There are no hilarious songs in this prelude such as were heard from the crests of the Blue Ridge when Spotswood's horsemen came up from the other side. It has to me the atmosphere and movement of some Greek tragedy, though one writer likens it to mediaval mummery. Perhaps it is only a knowledge of its import and the end that makes it sombre and grave despite the beautiful setting to this prelude which one may read to- day in the French archives. So full of portent and color it is that I wonder no one has woven its incidents, slight as they are, into French literature or into that of America.

"I left Lachine on the 15th of June," begins Celoron's journal, [Footnote: Margry, 6:666.] now in the Departement de la Marine, in Paris, "with a detachment formed of a captain, eight subaltern officers, six cadets, an armorer, twenty men of the troops, one hundred and eighty Canadians, and nearly thirty savages—equal number of Iroquois and Abenakes." They filled twenty-three canoes in a procession that was halted by shipwreck, by heat, by lack of rain and by too much rain, by difficult portages, and damage to the canoes.

Over a part of their first portage from Lake Erie I walked one night years ago through a drenching rain, such as they endured in the seven days in which they were carrying their canoes and baggage up those steep hills through the then dense forest of beech, oak, and elm, to the waters of Lake Chautauqua, where now many thousands gather every summer, from children to white-haired men and women, to study history, language, sciences, cooking, sewing, etc., and to attend conferences daily.

But the expedition then was often stopped by savages who ran away to avoid the excessive speechmaking and lecturing of these old-world orators, conferenciers; and the ears and eyes of the auditors who did not run away were opened by strings of wampum, though they were often too little moved by the love of their father Onontio and his concern lest the English should make themselves masters and the Indians their victims.

There is in a Paris library a map of this expedition made by the hand of Pere Bonnecamps, who signs himself "Jesuitte Mathematiciant." He kept a diary, [Footnote: Translation in "Jesuit Relations," ed. Thwaites, vol. 69. "Account of the voyage on the Beautiful River made in 1749 under the direction of Monsieur de Celoron."] also preserved in Paris, in which there has crept some of the sombreness of that narrow, dark valley (now filled with oil-derricks) surrounded by mountains sometimes so high as to let them see the sun only from nine or ten o'clock in the morning till two or three in the afternoon. And across the mountains one may hear even to- day the despairful, yet appealing, voice of Celoron, speaking for the great Onontio: "My children," he says, "since I have been at war with the English I have learned that that nation has seduced you; and, not content with corrupting your hearts, they have profited by my absence from the country to invade the land which does not belong to them and which is mine.... I will give you the aid you should expect from a good father.... I will furnish you traders in abundance if you wish them. I will send here officers if that please you—to give you good spirit, so that you will only work in good affairs.... Follow my advice. Then the sky will always be beautiful and clear over your villages." [Footnote: Margry, 6: 677.] "My father," said the spokesman for the savages at another council, "we pray you have pity on us; we are young men who cannot reply as the old men could; what you have said to us has opened our eyes [received gifts], given us spirit, we see that you only work with good affairs.... [The great Onontio in Paris is playing all the while in Paris with the louis d'or.] Examine, my father, the situation in which we are. If thou makest the English to retire, who give us necessaries, and especially the smith who mends our guns and hatchets, we would be without help and exposed to die of hunger and of misery in the Belle Riviere. Have pity on us, my father, thou canst not at present give us our necessaries. Leave us at least for this winter, or at least till we go hunting, the smith and some one who can help us. We promise thee that in the spring the English will retire." [Footnote: Margry, 6:683.]

And so the expedition passed on from river to river, from tribe to tribe, planting plates and making appeals to the savages, down the Ohio to the Miami, up the Miami, stopping at the village of a chief known as La Demoiselle, thence by portage to the French settlement on the Maumee, and so back to Lake Erie. Then came the fort builders in their wake, and so the "Spartoi," the soldiers, almost literally sprang from the earth of the sowing of the plates.

At one place (the place where the Loups prayed for a smith) they found a young Englishman with a few dozen workmen building a stockade, but they sent him back beyond the mountains over which he had come and built upon its site Fort Duquesne—the defense of the mountain gate to the great valley—here with a few hundred men on the edge of a hostile wilderness to make beginning of that mighty struggle which was to end, as we know, on the river by which Cartier and Champlain had made their way into the continent.

It is a fact, remarkable to us now, that the first to bring a challenge from behind the mountains to that brave and isolate garrison sitting in Fort Duquesne at the junction of the water paths, was Washington ("Sir Washington," as one chronicler has written it), not Washington the American but Washington the English subject, major in the colonial militia, envoy of an English governor of Virginia, Dinwiddie, who, having acquired a controlling interest in the Ohio Company, became especially active in planning to seat a hundred families on that transmontane estate of a half-million acres and so to win title to it.

"So complicated [were] the political interests of [that] time that a shot fired in America [was] the signal for setting all Europe together by the ears," wrote Voltaire, [Footnote: Voltaire, "The French in America" in his "Short Studies in English and American Subjects," p. 249.] and "it was not a cannon-shot" that gave the signal but, as Parkman said, "a volley from the hunting pieces of a few backwoodsmen, commanded by a Virginia youth, George Washington." [Footnote: Parkman, "Montcalm and Wolfe," 1:3.]

We must stop for a moment to look at this lithe young English colonist, twenty-one years of age, standing on the nearest edge of the French explorations and claims and the farthest verge of English adventure, on the watershed twenty miles from Lake Erie, and requesting, in the name of Governor Dinwiddie and of the shade of John Cabot, the peaceable departure of those French pioneers and soldiers, who, as the letter which the young colonel bore stated, were "erecting fortresses and making settlements upon the the river [Ohio] so notoriously known to be the property of the Crown of Great Britain."

The edge of the Great Lakes' basin is only a little way, at the place where he stood, from the watershed of the Mississippi River. A little farther up the shore, where Celoron made portage, it is only six or eight miles across, and here it is but a little more, and the "height of land" is hardly noticeable. The French built a fort on a promontory in the lake —a promontory almost an island—Presque Isle; and there, where the waters begin to run the other way, that is, toward the gulf, they built still another which they called Le Boeuf, an easier portage than the Chautauqua. From the former fort the city of Erie, a grimy, busy manufacturing city, has grown. The latter has produced only a village, on whose weed-grown outskirts the ruins of a fort still look out upon the meadow where the little stream called "French Creek" starts, first toward France, in its two-thousand-mile journey to the gulf that lies in the other direction.

For twenty miles I followed the stream one day to where it became a part of Celoron's river-in imagination calling the French back to its banks again, but finding them slow to come, for that part of the valley seemed not particularly attractive. It is a little farther down the lake that the vineyards fill all the shore from the lake to the watershed. And in that very country I have often wondered at the miracle which raised from one bit of ground the corn and the pumpkin, and from another the vine and filled its fruit with wine.

The one-eyed veteran, Legardeur de St. Pierre, the commander of Fort Le Boeuf, asked Washington, in rich diplomatic sarcasm, to descend to the particularization of facts, and the lithe figure disappeared behind the snows of the mountains only to come again across the mountains in the springtime with sterner questioning. There was then no talk of Cabot or La Salle, of Indian purchase or crown property. Jumonville may have come out from Duquesne for peaceable speech, but Washington misunderstood or would not listen. A flash of flint fire, a fresh bit of lead planted in the hill of laurel, a splash of blood on the rock, and the war for the west was begun.

What actually happened out on the slope of that hill will never be accurately known; but, though Washington was only twenty-two years old then, "full of military ardor" and "vehement," he could not have been guilty of wilful firing on men of peaceful intent.

It doubtless seemed but an insignificant skirmish when Washington attacked Jumonville near Pittsburgh, and it is now remembered by only a line or two in our histories and the little cairn of stones "far up among the mountain fogs near the headwaters of the Youghiogheny River," which marks the grave of Jumonville.

Washington, the major of colonial militia in the Alleghany Mountains, the scout of a land company, has been entirely forgotten in Washington, the father of a nation; but Jumonville, the French ensign with no land-scrip, fighting certainly as unselfishly and with as high purpose, is not forgotten in any later achievement. That skirmish ended all for him. But let it be remembered even now that he was a representative of France standing almost alone, at the confluence of all the waters for hundreds of miles on the other slope of the Alleghanies, in defense of what other men of France had won by their hardihood.

I heard a great audience at the Academy applaud the brave endurance of French priests and soldiers in Asia. Some day I hope these unrenowned men who sacrificed as much for France in America will be as notably remembered. There is a short street in Pittsburgh that bears Jumonville's name—a short street that runs from the river into a larger street with the name of one of his seven brothers, De Villiers, Coulon de Villiers, who hastened from Montreal, while another brother hastened from the Illinois to avenge his death.

But the cairn on the hillside has grown to no high monument. Mr. Hulbert, who has written with filial pen of the valley, says that occasionally a traveller repairs a rough wooden cross made of boards or tree branches and planted among the rocks of the cairn. [Footnote: A. B. Hulbert, "The Ohio River," pp. 44, 45.] But on a recent visit to the grave out in that lonesome ravine, I found that a permanent tablet had been placed there instead of this fragile cross.

I must leave to your unrefreshed memories the exploits of Beaujeu and Braddock, of Contrecoeur and Forbes, blow up Fort Duquesne of the past, and come into the city of to-day, for I wish to put against this background this mighty city where it is often difficult to see because of the smoke.

The French, as we are well aware, came to their forts by water. Quebec, Frontenac, Niagara, Presque Isle, the Rock St. Louis, St. Joseph, Chartres, and many others stood by river or lake. But the going was often slow. Celoron (whose name is often spelled Celeron but would seem not to deserve that spelling) was fifty-three days in making his water journey from Montreal to the site of Pittsburgh. But a Celoron of to-day may see the light of the Bartholdi statue in New York harbor at ten o'clock by night and yet pass Braddock's field in the morning (before the time that Bonnecamp said the sun came up in the narrow valley of the Belle Riviere), and have breakfast at the Duquesne Club in time for a city day's work. It was about as far from Paris to Marseilles in 1750 as it is to-day from Paris to Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh is the front door of the valley of La Salle, as we now know the valley, and the most important door; for the tonnage that enters and leaves it by rail and water (177,071,238 tons in 1912 for the Pittsburgh district) exceeds the tonnage of the five other greatest cities of the world [Footnote: R. B. Naylor, address before the Ohio Valley Historical Association (quoted in Hulbert, "Ohio River," pp. 365-6).] and is twice the combined tonnage of both coasts of the United States to and from foreign ports—which is probably due to the fact that so much of its traffic is not in silks and furs but in iron and coal. And the multitudes of human beings that pass through it are comparable in number with the migrant tonnage and inanimate cargoes; for Pittsburgh is "the antithesis of a mediaeval town"; "it is all motion;" "it is a flow, not a tank." The mountains, once impenetrable barriers that had to be gone about, have been levelled, and in the levelling the watersheds, as we have seen, have been shifted. One who sees that throng pass to-day back and forth, to and from the valley and the ocean, must know that there are no Alleghanies in our continental topography, as Washington saw and as Webster stated there could not be in our politics. If one makes the journey from the ocean in the night, one may hear, if one wakes, the puffing of two engines, as in the Jura Mountains, but there will be nothing else to tell him that the shaggy Alleghany Mountains have not been cast into the midst of the sea— nothing except the groaning of the wheels.

The Indians near Pittsburgh, I have said, prayed the messenger of Onontio that they might keep their English smith—and the prayer seems to have been abundantly answered, for Pittsburgh appears at first to be one vast smithy, so enveloped is it in the smoke of its own toil, so reddened are its great sky walls by its flaming forges, so filled is the air with the dust from the bellows, and so clangorous is the sound of its hammers. It is a city of Vulcans—a city whose industry makes academic discussions seem as the play of girls in a field of flowers. It is not primarily a market-place, this point of land, one of the places where the French and English traders used to barter guns, whiskey, and trinkets for furs. It is a making place—a pit between the hills, where the fires of creation are still burning.

Celoron and his sombre voyage had been in my mind all day, as I sat in a beautiful library of that city among books of the past; but in the evening, as Dante accompanied by Virgil, I descended circle by circle to the floor of the valley—with this difference, that it was not to a place of torment but to the halls of the swarth gods of creation, those great, dim, shadowy sheds that stretch along the river's edge. Into these, men of France, has your Fort Duquesne grown—mile on mile of flame-belching buildings, with a garrison as great as the population of all New France in the day of Duquesne.

The new-world epic will find some of its color and incident there—an epic in which we have already heard the men of France nailing the sheets of "white iron" against the trees of the valley of La Belle Riviere. And as I saw the white-hot sheets of iron issuing from those crunching rollers, driven by the power of seven thousand horses, I felt that the youth with the stamping iron should have put a fleur-de-lis upon each with all his other cabalistic markings, for who of us can know that any metal would ever have flowed white from the furnaces in that valley if the white-metal signs of Louis XV had not first been carried into it?

In each of these halls there pass in orderly succession cars with varied cargoes; red ore from the faraway hills beyond Superior, limestone fragments from some near-by hill, and scrap of earlier burning. These, one by one, are seized by a great arm of iron, thrust out from a huge moving structure that looks like a battering-ram and is operated by a young man about whom the lightnings play as he moves; and, one by one, they are cast into the furnaces that are heated to a temperature of a thousand degrees or more. There the red earth is freed of its "devils," as the great ironmaster has named the sulphur and phosphorus—freed of its devils as the red child was freed of his sins by the touch of holy water from the fingers of Allouez out in those very forests from which the red ore was dug—and comes forth purified, to be cast into flaming ingots, to be again heated and then crushed and moulded and sawed and pierced for the better service of man.

In the course of a few minutes one sees a few iron carloads of ore that was a month before lying in the earth beyond Superior transformed into a girder for a bridge, a steel rail, a bit of armor-plate, a beam for a sky- scraper—and all in utter human silence, with the calm pushing and pulling of a few levers, the accurate shovelling by a few hands, the deliberate testing by a few pairs of experienced eyes.

Here is the new Fort Duquesne that is holding the place of the confluence of the rivers and trails just beyond the Alleghanies, and this is the ammunition with which that begrimed but strong-faced garrison defends the valley to-day, supports the city on the environing hills and the convoluted plateau back of the point, spans streams the world around, builds the skeletons of new cities and protects the coasts of their country.

There are many others in that garrison, but these makers of steel are the core of that city, in which "the modern world," to use the words of one of our first economists, "achieves its grandest triumph and faces its gravest problem" [Footnote: John R. Commons, in Survey, March 6, 1909, 1:1051.] —the "mighty storm mountain of capital and labor."

I quote from this same economist a comprehensive paragraph descriptive of its riches: "Through hills which line these [confluent] rivers run enormous veins of bituminous coal. Located near the surface, the coal is easily mined, and elevated above the rivers, much of it comes down to Pittsburgh by gravity. There are twenty-nine billion tons of it, good for steam, gas or coke. Then there are vast stores of oil [seven million five hundred thousand gallons annually] natural gas [of which two hundred and fifty million feet are consumed daily], sand, shale, clay and stone, with which to give Pittsburgh and the tributary country the lead of the world in iron and steel, glass, electrical machinery, street-cars, tin plate, air-brakes and firebrick." [Footnote: J. R. Commons, "Wage Earners of Pittsburg," in Survey, March 6, 1909, 21:1051-64.]

And to all this natural bounty the national government has added that of the tariff and of millions spent in river improvements, while Europe has contributed raw labor already fed to the strength of oxen and often already developed to highest skill. It was a young chemist trained in Europe who conducted me through the mills, explaining all the processes in a perfect idiomatic speech, though of broken accent.

The white-hot steel ingot swinging beneath a smoky sky is a sign of the contribution of France through Pittsburgh to civilization, not merely the material but the human contribution. The ingot, a great block of white-hot steel, is the sign of her labor, which has assembled the scattered elements of the valley and, in the fierce heat of natural and unfed fires, has compounded them into a new metal that is something more than iron, more valuable than gold. But it is only another sign, too, of forces that have assembled from all parts of the earth, men represented in the varied cargoes that are poured by a seemingly omnipotent hand into those furnaces—red-blooded men, and with them slag that has gone through the fires of older civilizations.

Here, let me say again, is being made a new metal; this no one can doubt. It is not merely a melting and a restamping of old coin with a new superscription, a new sovereignty—a composite face instead of a personal likeness—it is the making, as I have said in other illustrations and metaphors, of a new race.

If I had an instinct of human character, such as the intuitive sense of the fibre and tension of steel possessed by the man who watches the boiling in the furnaces and who, from time to time, puts aside his smoked glasses and looks at the texture of a typical bit of his metal, or who stands at the emptying of the furnace into the ladle and directs the addition of carbon or magnesium to bring his output to the right constituency, I could tell you what strains and stresses this new people would stand. As it is, I can only make a surmise, perhaps not more valuable than yours.

The makers of steel were concerned only to get the primacy in steel. Human character was of concern only as it made better steel and more of it. They took the red ore where they could get it richest in iron and cheapest, and they took red-blooded labor where they could get it strongest—sinewed, clearest-eyed, and cheapest. "There are no able-bodied men between the ages of sixteen and fifty years left in my native town," said a Servian workman in the mills. "They have all come to America. The agricultural districts and villages of the mid-eastern valleys of Europe are sending their strongest men and youths, nourished of good diet and in pure air, stolid and care-free, into that dim canyon-Servians, Croatians, Ruthenians, Lithuanians, Slovaks, with Italians, Poles, and Russian Jews." [Footnote: P. Roberts, "The New Pittsburg," in Charities and the Commons, January 2, 1909, 21:533. See also J. A. Fitch, "The Steel Workers," New York, 1910.] It is from Slavs and mixed people of the old European midland, says one, "where the successive waves of broad-headed and fair-haired peoples gathered force and swept westward to become Celt and Saxon, and Swiss and Scandinavian and Teuton," the old European midland with its "racial and religious loves and hates seared deep, that the new immigration is coming to Pittsburgh to work out civilization under tense conditions"—not with that purpose, to be sure, but with that certain result. The conscious purposes have been expressed in the tangible ingots, the wages they have offered them in their hot hands, and the profits. The civilization has been incidental.

There is developing, however, an effort in the midst of this "dynamic individualism" to make both the new and the old immigration work out "civilization." This individualism was prodigal, profligate, at first. But it has learned thrift; it by and by came to burn its gas over and over; it made the purifying substances go on in a continued round of service; it became more mindful of human muscles and bones and eyes and ears; it took the latest advice of experts, but for steel's sake, not civilization's.

Mr. Carnegie, when a manufacturer there, found 90 per cent of pure iron in the refuse of his competitor, it is said. This he bought under long contract and worked over in his own mills. His neighbor's waste became a part of his fortune. And the result of that discernment and thrift is now furnishing an analogue for the conscious utilization of other waste—waste of native capacity of the steel-worker for happiness and usefulness.

Mr. Carnegie has indeed led the way in the establishment of libraries, art galleries, museums, institutes of training and research out of what were but waste if spent as some millionaires spend their profits. All these things upon the hills are by-products of the steel-mills down in the ravine. In every luminous ingot swung in the mills that were his, there is something toward the pension of a university professor out in Oregon, something for an artist in New York or Paris, something for an astronomer on the top of Mount Wilson, something for the teacher in the school upon the hill, something for every library established by his gift.

What is now making itself felt, however, is a desire to get the wage element in the ingot as thriftily, as efficiently, as nobly converted and used to the last ounce as is the profit element. There has been in the past a masterful individualism at work. Now there is a masterful aggressive humanism beginning to make itself felt, comparable in its spirit with the masterful venturing of the French explorers or the masterful faith of the French missionaries, that promises to constrain the city "to the saving and enhancing of individual and collective human power," even as the French missionaries tried to constrain the great fur- trading prospects of France to the saving of human souls.

The attempt to realize an urban paradise is becoming a conscious purpose as this extract made from a report made to a city-plan committee of a Pittsburgh commission will indicate:

"A third undeveloped asset in the Pittsburgh waterfront is its value for recreation and as an element of civic comeliness and self-respect. One of the deplorable consequences of the short-sighted and wasteful commercialism of the later nineteenth century lay in its disregard of what might have been the asthetic byproducts of economic improvement; in the false impression spread abroad that economical and useful things were normally ugly; and in the vicious idea which followed, that beauty and the higher pleasures of civilized life were to be sought only in things otherwise useless. Thus the pursuit of beauty was confounded with extravagance.

"Among the most significant illustrations of the fallacy of such ideas are the comeliness and the incidental recreation value which attach to many of the commercial water fronts of European river ports, and it is along such lines that Pittsburgh still has opportunity for redeeming the sordid aspect of its business centre.

"Wherever in the world, as an incident of the highways and wharves along its river banks, a city has provided opportunity for the people to walk and sit under pleasant conditions, where they can watch the water and the life upon it, where they can enjoy the breadth of outlook and the sight of the open sky and the opposite bank and the reflections in the stream, the result has added to the comeliness of the city itself, the health and happiness of the people, and their loyalty and local pride. This has been true in the case of a bare paved promenade, running along like an elevated railroad over the sheds and tracks and derricks of a busy ocean port, as at Antwerp, in the case of a tree-shaded sidewalk along a commercial street with the river quays below it, as at Paris and Lyons and hundreds of lesser cities; and in the case of a broad embankment garden won from the mud banks by dredging and filling, as at London."

I had great difficulty in finding a bookstore in Pittsburgh. Some day that idealistic condition which makes the Seine so dear to thousands who know its every mood, and so dear both to the wise and the ignorant, may obtain on La Belle Riviere.

This is but one item of a planning for the future of this city which thinks not merely of its beautifying and of the pleasure of its people in their leisure, but of all conditions which affect the health, convenience, education, and general welfare of the whole district—that region once called the "black country," of which Pittsburgh was the "dingy capital"— one of the regions where the French were pioneers.

I have spoken of this as the "taking thought" of a democratic community. More accurately, a body of one hundred volunteer citizens, disposing themselves in fourteen different committees (including those on rapid transit, industrial accidents, city housing, and public hygiene), have undertaken all this labor of constructive planning at their own expense (based upon a series of investigations made by endowed researchers), but with the hope of creating a public opinion favorable to their plans, which look to the establishment by the democratic community of "such living and working conditions as may set a standard for other American industrial centres." [Footnote: Olmsted, F. L., "Pittsburgh, Main Thoroughfares and the Down-Town District." Pittsburgh Civic Commission, 1910. Survey, February 4, 1911, 25:740-4.]

No such thorough and systematic study of existing city conditions has been made anywhere else in America. It is quite as scientific as the scholarly studies of buried cities, only immensely more complex and difficult. Knowing itself and possessed of an unconquerable spirit, it seems likely now that Pittsburgh will win back the beautiful site which Celoron remarked when he passed down La Belle Riviere—a site which even "Florence might covet"—and will make it a city that will deserve to keep always the other part of the name of the sower of the leaden plates—Bienville.

A pillar of cloud stands over the city by day and a pillar of fire by night. They have together shown the way out of the wilderness. It now remains to be seen whether the highest things of men's longing will have realization, in giving that "dynamic individualism" a social ideal with distinct, practicable working plans.

Pittsburgh stands on the edge of the valley of the new democracy. It has put its plates along every path. There is hardly a village of any size from the Alleghanies to the Rockies that it has not laid some claim to by its strips of steel. There is hardly a stream of any size that it has not claimed by a bridge. It has, indeed, the spirit of Celoron, in other body, still planting monuments of France's renewal of possession, wherever the steel rails and girders and plates from the Pittsburgh mills have been carried. And Pittsburgh is but one of the renewed cities which encompass the eastern half of the valley where once stretched the chain of French forts futile in defense but powerful in prophecy.

When we see the American city, even through the eyes of Walt Whitman, that poet of democracy, it seems a desperate hope that is left her: "Are there, indeed, men here in the city," he asks, "worthy the name? Are there athletes? Are there perfect women to match the generous material luxuriance? Is there a pervading atmosphere of beautiful manners? Are there crops of fine youths and majestic old persons? Are there arts worthy freedom and a rich people? Is there a great moral and religious civilization—the only justification of a great material one? Confess that to severe eyes, using the moral microscope upon humanity, a sort of dry and flat Sahara appears, these cities crowded with petty grotesques, malformations, phantoms, playing meaningless antics. Confess that everywhere, in shop, street, church, theatre, barroom, official chair, are pervading flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity—everywhere the youth puny, impudent, foppish, prematurely ripe—everywhere an abnormal libidinousness, unhealthy forms, male, female, painted, padded, dyed, chignon'd, muddy complexions, bad blood, the capacity for good motherhood decreasing or deceas'd, shallow notions of beauty, with a range of manners, or rather lack of manners (considering the advantages enjoy'd) probably the meanest to be seen in the world." [Footnote: "Democratic Vistas," in his "Complete Works," pp. 205, 206.]

But it is no such desperate hope that the cities we have seen spring from French fort and portage keep in their hearts. It is not even a confession that one would have to make to-day in the American cities which Whitman had in mind in his gloomy, foreboding vision. I have seen on the streets of one of the Whitman cities [Footnote: New York City.] those same grotesques, malformations, and meaningless antics, that flippancy and vulgarity and cunning, that foppishness and premature ripeness, that painted, bad-complexioned, bad-mannered, shallow-beautied humanity; but touching, as I have had opportunity to touch, three of the great agencies of its aspirations—its philanthropies, its literature, and its schools—I know that no body of five million people, whether huddled in tenements or scattered over plain and mountain and along rivers and seas, has with more serious or sacrificing purpose aspired, though constantly disturbed in its prayers, its operations, by people of every tongue, nearly a million strong, who are emptied at her port every year from Europe and Asia, besides the hundreds of thousands who come up from the country. There are public schools, for example, in certain parts of that city where there is not a child of American parentage. There is one, in particular, which I visit frequently and which I call the "oasis" in the desert of humanity (Walt Whitman's Sahara), where two or three thousand children are gathered, literally from the plains of Russia, the valleys of Italy, and other parts of Europe—for these were their ancestral homes, though they come immediately from the swarming streets and dimly lighted, ill-smelling tenements of New York—and there, aspiring under the hopeful teaching of the city, I have heard them, boys and girls together, sing, with all the joy and cleanliness of shepherd children, of a leading in green pastures and by still waters.

But to come back to the cities in the valley of Nouvelle France, there is no note of else than hope there. Mistakes, disappointments, crudities, infidelities? Yes, but the mistakes, disappointments, crudities, failures of youth—youth of strong passions and love of play but of a masterful will that a generous nature has so much encouraged and aided as to obscure its limitations.

A few rods from the Carnegie Library and Museum of Art and Concert Hall in Pittsburgh is a baseball field, where a million people or more come in the course of the season to see trained men play an out-of-door game (and if it chanced that the President of the United States were visiting the city, he might be seen there accompanied by his secretary of state or the president of a great university). In Chicago I found the whole city, young and old, united in its interest in the results of the "game" of the day before or the prospects of the next. When games are played for the great championship pennant the city virtually takes a holiday.

But that is the spirit of youth in those overgrown, awkward cities that are only now beginning to be self-conscious and seriously purposeful in doing more than the things conventionally and for the most part selfishly done by cities generally. In the conjugation of their busy, noisy life they do not often use the past tense, never the past-perfect, and they have had for the most part little concern as to the future, except the rise in real-estate values and the retaining of markets. When in Pittsburgh I asked a prominent man, of French ancestry, why the people did not keep from the destroying hand of private enterprise the site of old Fort Duquesne (the fecund plot from which the great city had grown), and he said it was all they could do to keep the little blockhouse that remained of Fort Pitt, filling a space a few yards square. What claim has the past as against the needs of industry in the present? That was the attitude of that grimy individualism born in "barefoot square" or in "slab alley," in the land of smoke and flame and "rusty rivers."

And the future? Well, the voice of the French priest and of those ministers of his own and other faiths that have followed in his footsteps is still heard there crying of the world to come.

Several years ago on my way into that valley, on one of those fast trains that tie the east and west together, we came shrieking, thundering down the mountain slopes in the dusk of the day, past Jumonville's grave, past Braddock's field, past miles on miles of glowing coke-ovens, past acres upon acres of factories with their thousands of lighted windows, past flaming towers and chimneys into the midst of the modern babel, the tops of whose buildings were hidden in smoke, when suddenly, above the noise and clangor of whistles and wheels, I heard the rich, deep voice of a cathedral bell telling that the priest was still at the side of the explorer and trader and the iron coureur de bois.

It is not, however, of the celestial but of the terrestrial future that I am permitted to speak.

For, as I intimated, these young cities of the west, only a half-century old as cities—children by the side of Paris, London, Rome—are beginning seriously to take thought of the morrow, not simply of multiplying their numbers nor of sending their multitudes back to the country but of giving them prospect and promise of a better, more comfortable, more wholesome life, capable of a higher individual and collective development within the city. For while cities have been preached against since the time when Jonah cried against Nineveh, and while cities have perished and have been buried, even as Nineveh, the generic city, the assembling of gregarious men, continues and increases.

The census returns for 1910 for the American cities show, so far as I noticed, scarcely a single loss of population in the last ten years [Footnote: Cities with losses of population in the decade are Galveston, Texas: 37,389 in 1900, 36,981 in 1910; Chelsea, Mass.: 34,072 in 1900, 32,452 in 1910; St. Joseph, Mo.: 102,979 in 1900, 77,403 in 1910.] and a large gain for nearly every city of the middle west. It is prophesied that before long one-half of the people of the United States will be living in cities, and there is the more distant prospect that the urban population will be two-thirds of the whole. [Footnote: In 1910 46.3 per cent resided in communities classed by the census as urban, and 55.1 per cent in cities and incorporated or unincorporated villages.]

It is hopeless to try to turn that tide away from the cities except to suburban fields. So the great problem of that valley is to improve the cities, since from them are to be the issues of the new life, since they are, indeed, the hope of democracy.

I have thought it of significance that the envisioned place of ultimate celestial felicity-seen though it was by a man in the solitude of a cave in an island of the Mediterranean (the place which the civilized world has dimly hanging over it, whenever it looks away from its tasks and into the beyond)—is not a lotus-land, not an oasis of spring and palm, not a stretch of forest and mountain, not even a quiet place by a sea of jasper, but a place of many tenements—a city, a perfect city to be sure, let down ultimately from the skies, with walls of precious stones—and no zone for Kipling's "Tomlinsons" about it—with gates whose octroi officials keep out whatever makes an abomination or a lie, but which are open to the east and west, the north and south, that the kings of earth may bring their glory and honor into it—a city whose streets are clean and smooth—a city that has flowing through it a river of pure water, on whose banks grow trees whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.

The obvious thing to do, since, good or bad, the country is emptying its population into the cities, since we cannot go back through the gates of Eden into the garden paradise of Genesis, is to go toward the city of the Apocalypses, not, to be sure, as the Oriental mind of John saw it, paved and walled with precious stones and gold, but made as beautiful as the Occidental taste and architectural skill will permit, as comfortable as Occidental standards demand, and as sanitary as the mortal desire for immortality can with finite wisdom make it.

I was speaking some time ago of a painting I once saw, in illustration of the death of Eve, which represented her as on a journey in her haggard old age, accompanied by Cain (whose son built the first city in a wilderness), and as pausing in the journey on a height of ground, pointing toward a little cluster of trees in the distance, and saying to her son: "There was Paradise." But paradise is not to be realized by the masses of men in the return of man to the forests. The healing trees and the river are to be carried to the city.



CHAPTER XII

WESTERN TOWNS AND CITIES THAT HAVE SPRUNG FROM FRENCH PORTAGE PATHS

The old French portage paths were also fruitful of cities on the edge of the Mississippi Valley, though the growth of these short paths was not— with one notable exception—as luxuriant as that from the earth enriched of human blood and bones about the old French forts.

These portages, or carrying paths, which differ from the trails of the wood runners in that they are but short interruptions of the water paths and were not designed or laid out, as a rule, by the wild engineers of the forests and prairies but by human feet, lie across the great highway along which, before the days of canals, one might have walked dry-shod from the Atlantic to the Pacific—between the basins of the St. Lawrence and the Atlantic, the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, the Pacific and the Arctic —a highway which has, however, been trodden by no one probably through its entire length, for in places it runs over inaccessible peaks of mountains and winds around the narrowest of ledges. But the paths across it—those connecting the streams that flow in opposite directions from the continental watersheds—are like isthmian paths between great oceans— great dry oceans with watercourses through them.

There were, to be sure, still other portage paths than those across watersheds, and the most common were those that led around waterfalls or impassable rapids, such as Champlain and the Jesuits followed on their journeys up the Ottawa to the Nipissing. It was of such portages that Father Brebeuf wrote—portage paths passing almost continually by torrents, by precipices, and by places that were horrible in every way. In less than five days they made more than thirty-five portages, some of which were three leagues long. This means that on these occasions the traveller had to carry on his shoulders his canoe and all his baggage, with so little food that he was continually hungry and almost without strength and vigor. [Footnote: "Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 8:75-77.] Another priest tells of a portage occupying an entire day, during which he climbed mountains and pierced forests and carried, the while, his chapel and his little store of provisions.

Of whatever variety, however, these portage paths were frequently burying- grounds. Sometimes altars were erected beside them. They were often places of encampments, of assemblies, and more often of ambuscades. So it came about, too, that they were made the places of minor forts or gave occasion for forts farther on the way. In those precivilized Panama days, the neutrality of the isthmian paths could not be assured, and so they were fortified.

Celoron tells of the mending of boats at the end of his Chautauqua portages, and that statement, with other like incidents, has led one authority to picture the birches—those beautiful white and golden trees of the sombre northern woods that gave their cloaks to the travellers who asked and shivered till they grew others—stripped of their bark where those paths came down to the streams. He has even imagined primitive carpenter shops and ovens and huts on these paths where the voyageurs must stop for repairs, food, and rest—the precursors of garage, road-house, and hotel.

But on maps in the Bibliotheque Nationale names of portage paths have been found which assure us that these difficult ways were not without charm to those early travellers, as they have been to many a wanderer since; for there was Portage des Roses, where the wild rose brightened the way; and Portage de la Musique, where the water sang constantly its song in the solitude. Then there were Portage de la Roche Fendue, Portage des Chenes, Portage des Perches, Portage Talon, and Portage des Recollets, named in memory of experiences of men whom the voyageurs wished to recall or to honor, just as the French give to their streets such names as "Rue des Fleurs," "Boulevard des Capucines." [Footnote: A. B. Hulbert, "Historic Highways of America," 7:49.]

The portage paths that became in time most fruitful were generally short, well-cleared, and deep-furrowed by feet. On three of the most important and historic of these paths from the basin of the Great Lakes to that of the Mississippi I have walked with the memories of these precursors; in one place it was suggested that I should ride in a carriage, but I refused, feeling that these men must be worshipped on foot. The first of these portages is that path of which I have already spoken several times (and which I never tire of letting my imagination travel again), the one over which Nicolet must have passed from the Fox River into the Wisconsin River, if he got so far on his way to Muscovy—the path to which Father Dablon said the way was as through a paradise, but was as hard as the way to heaven [Footnote: "If the country ... somewhat resembles an earthly paradise in beauty, the way leading to it may be said to bear some likeness to the one depicted by our Lord as leading to Heaven."—"Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 55:191.]—the path which the coureurs de bois Radisson and Groseilliers doubtless followed; the path which La Salle may have found in those two years of mysterious absence in the valley; the path Marquette and Joliet and hundreds after them certainly took on their way from Montreal to the Mississippi or from the Mississippi back to Montreal. You would not know this narrow strip—not a mile wide—to be a watershed dividing the continent, the north from the south; you would not know it for the threshold to the Mississippi Valley. The plain which the path crosses seems to the eye as level as a table. Undoubtedly before the tipping of the bed of the lakes the water flowed over this path. Indeed, La Salle in one of his letters refers to the portaging here of canoes past an "oak grove and across a flooded meadow." The tree of which he speaks, with two canoes clumsily drawn upon it by the savages, to mark the beginning of the portage at the Wisconsin, has gone, but a monument of red granite now stands there with the names of Marquette and Joliet upon it. At the other end of the now macadamized "path" there is a little red bridge that leads across the Fox to where a portage fort grew later into an important trading-post; but now there is no trace of those monuments of war and trade. There is a farmhouse on their site whose tenants are in fear only of drought and early frosts. A canal crosses this little isthmus and once it interlocked the east and west, the arctic plains with the subtropic cane fields; but it has given over its work to the railroads, having served, however, I have no doubt, to water the roots of the beautiful town that bears the generic name of all those places where burdens were borne between waters. "Wauona," the Indians called it, more euphoniously, but with the same significance as "Portage"—in the State that has taken the name of the river that carried the burdens on to the Mississippi—Wisconsin. This town has lately crept modestly into our western literature as "Friendship Village." [Footnote: Zona Gale, "Friendship Village." Macmillan, New York, 1908.] Except that it has a more comely setting than most towns of the plains—even of those northern plains with their restful undulations—and has a brighter, cleaner aspect —since a light-colored brick is used instead of the red so much in favor where wood is forbidden by the fire laws—it is a typical western town— the next size larger than "Aramoni"; and so I must stop here for a moment where Marquette, son of Rose de la Salle of Rheims, and Joliet, the wagon maker of Quebec, came up out of the twisting little stream that is still one of the fountains of the Atlantic.

For none the less is this village, standing beside this fountain (again more euphoniously called the Kaka-ling or Kaukauna), itself touching the Atlantic shores and even mingling with currents that reach the European coasts. There was born in this village the historian [Footnote: Frederick Jackson Turner.] who has written so well of the rise of that western country that he has been called to the professorship of American history at Harvard University, a literal son of the portage, who has rediscovered the west to the world. And recently all the valley, and other valleys, too, have been reading the stories of this place of portage (called, as I have said, "Friendship Village"), written by a young woman whose windows look out from her home upon the Wisconsin River not many paces from Marquette's place of embarkation—a true daughter of the portage.

The French, who have given the new continent this portage path out of Europe into the very heart of America, should read with some gratification of the more intimate life that dwells there back of and in the midst of the bustling, tireless, noisy industry of the valley.

"The long Caledonian hills" [the same which La Salle describes], "the four rhythmic spans of the bridge" [a bridge of iron, not of vines and flowers such as Chateaubriand describes], "the nearer river, the island where the first birds build—these teach our windows the quiet and the opportunity of the home town, its kindly brooding companionship, its doors to an efficiency as intimate as that of fairy fingers." [Footnote: "Friendship Village," p. vii, author's note.] And this is but one of thousands of "home towns" in that great basin, towns with Daphne streets and Queen Anne houses, and gloomy court-houses and austere churches and miniature libraries, towns that taper off into suburban shanties, towns that have in these new bottles, of varied and pretentious shapes, the best wine of that western world.

The author of "Friendship Village" has vision of the more beautiful towns into which these towns will some day grow, as yours have grown more beautiful with age. "All the way," she writes, seeing the sunset from that same river of the portage as Marquette saw it, "I had been watching against the gold the jogging homeward of empty carts.... Such a procession I want to see painted upon a sovereign sky. I want to have painted a giant carpenter of the village as I once saw him, his great bare arms upholding a huge white pillar, while blue figures hung above and set the acanthus capital.... Some day we shall see these things in their own surprising values and fresco our village libraries with them." [Footnote: Zona Gale, "Friendship Village Love Stories," p. 47.] That appreciation and expression of the beautiful is something that the French explorers in that other world—the valley reached of the pioneers of the seeing eyes and the understanding hearts—have carried and will continue to carry over those same portages, to give that virile life of the west some of those higher satisfactions of which this daughter of the portage is the prophetess.

Another portage path of importance is that which Marquette may also have trodden, or may even have been carried over by his faithful attendants, Pierre Porteret and Jacques, on his death journey from the land of the Illinois to the mission of Michilimackinac, which he did not reach alive— a journey, the latter part of which was like that of King Arthur borne in a barge by his faithful knight, Sir Bedivere, to his last resting-place, the Vale of Avalon. This portage, varying in length with the season from three to five miles, was the St. Joseph-Kankakee Portage. La Salle, Tonty, and Hennepin passed over it in 1679 on a less spiritual errand to the same land whose inhabitants Marquette had tried to instruct in the mystery of the faith. And it was well worn by adventurous and pious feet in the century that followed.

What traffic in temporal and spiritual things was here carried over, is intimated by relics of that century found in the fields not far away, where for many years a French mission house stood with enough of a military garrison to invite for it the name "Fort St. Joseph." In the room of the Northern Indiana Historical Society at this portage there are to be seen some of these relics, sifted from the dirt and sand: crucifixes, knives, awls, beads—which I am told are clearly the loot of ancient Roman cities, traded to the Indians for hides—iron rings, nails, and hinges- these with flint arrow-heads and axes, relics of the first munitions of the stone and iron ages out on the edges of civilization.

This portage path between the rivers is now obliterated by railroads, paved streets, furrows, graves, factories, and dwellings; but down by the St. Joseph River there stands a withered cedar, perhaps several hundred years old, which bears scars that are believed to be the blaze marks of the broad-bladed axes of the French explorers—made to indicate the place where the portage out of the river began, the place which La Salle missed when lost in the forest but afterward found, where Father Gabriel made several crosses, as Hennepin records, on the trees—perhaps these very marks-and where La Salle left letters for the guidance over the prairie of those "who were to come in the vessel"—thinking of the captain of the Griffin who was ordered to follow him to the Illinois on his return.

It is only a little more than a league from this landing at the bend of the river (which has given the name "South Bend" to the town) across the "large prairie" to the wet meadows in whose ooze the tortuous Kankakee River became navigable, in La Salle's day, a hundred paces from its source, and increased so rapidly in volume that, as he says in a letter, "in a short time it becomes as broad and deep as the Marne"—the Marne which he knew in his boyhood and for which any but his iron heart must have longed.

Charlevoix walked across those unchanged fields of St. Joseph a half century (1674-1720) after La Salle, and Parkman made the same journey nearly a century after Charlevoix, finding there what he called "a dirty little town." To-day a clean, industrious, eager city of over fifty-three thousand, with a world horizon, as well as a provincial pride, throws its shadow in the early morning across the path. Through its outskirts I tried years ago to trace this portage path and there with my companion (who was always the "Tonty" of my voyages on those western streams), put my boat in the river and paddled and poled the seventy-five miles down the St. Joseph River to the lake, where, as I wanted to believe, Marquette had made his last journey. Hearing, some time after, of the blaze marks on the cedar- tree, I went again to the portage, and from this old red cedar-tree again traced the probable course of the French to the fields of corn, or maize, yellow in the autumn sun that hid the fountains of the Kankakee. This time, having but little leisure, I rode in an automobile from one end to the other through and along the path, looking occasionally toward the sky for air-ships that were due to alight there on their way from Chicago to New York.

In La Salle's packs, carried over that portage, were blacksmith's tools— forge, bellows, anvil, iron for nails—and carpenter's and joiner's tools. One might easily believe that they were left there—such have been the products of that portage strip, two or three miles wide.

First, there has grown there the largest wagon factory in the world. The path of the pack and the burden has here produced as its peculiar contribution to civilization that which is to carry burdens, instead of the backs of men, the world round.

Second, here stands the world's largest plough factory—a place from which ploughs are sent to every arable valley that civilization has conquered and made to feel its hunger.

Third, here spreading its acres, or arpents, of buildings across the high ground between the two rivers, is the largest factory in the world for the making of certain parts of the sewing-machine; in every community of any size in the world it has an agency.

And here, last of all, besides more than a hundred minor industries, is what is, to my great surprise, said to be the largest toy factory in the world.

The gift of wagons for the bearing and easing of men's burdens; the gift of the steel plough that has lifted man from the primitive subsistence of the hoe; the gift of the shuttle which has released woman from the tyranny of the needle; the gift of toys to the children of all races; has not this portage prairie, this meadow of St. Joseph, had some element mixed with its loam and clay from the spirit of those Gallic precursors of American energy, something that has given this industry a wider venture, if not peculiar expression? At any rate, its gifts to its time have been far beyond common, of the tangible at least; and as to the intangible, the day that I last spent on this portage an art league was being formed to foster an interest in art and bring the best examples available to what were, but a little time ago, dreary meadows half covered with snow and strewn with skulls and bones of the buffalo. The most modern schools are being developed and maintained by the public, and the University of Notre Dame and the College of St. Mary look across the river to this portage field and city.

One might have passed this portage so difficult to discern, as La Salle did, and yet have found another way to the lower Mississippi, with a short portage from this same stream to the Wabash River. A still shorter way than any of these, and doubtless known to La Salle from his first years of wanderings in the eastern end of the Mississippi Valley, led from the west end of Lake Erie up the Maumee and then by portage to the Wabash and the Ohio. This was the path that Celoron followed homeward on his memorable plate-planting journey. But the portage was so long that he burned his shattered canoes near the source of the Miami and was furnished with boats at the French fort near the headwaters of the Maumee. The hostility of the Iroquois, as we have seen, made perilous to the French in the earlier days this path, so important among Indian highways as often to be called the "Indian Appian Way."

Excepting the portage paths farther up the valley, notably that of St. Esprit, and important chiefly as fur-trading paths, there remains but one other historic portage path across the ridge of stone and swamp and prairie from which are pendent, on the one side, all the silver streams of the Mississippi Valley and, on the other side, all the Great Lakes and all the rivers that flow into them.

This remaining path is the tenuous trail through the fields of wild onions that led from the river or creek called Chicago (the Garlic River—Riviere de l'Ail) into a stream that still bears a French name but of a pronunciation which a Parisian would not accept—the Des Plaines. This path, too, traversed a marsh and flat prairie so level that in freshet the water ran both ways and was once in the bed of a river that ran from the lake to the gulf. But it has been hallowed beyond all others of these trails, for it was beside this portage that Marquette suffered through a winter, detained there by a serious sickness when on his way to minister to the Illinois Indians a hundred miles below. His hut was the first European habitation upon its site—the site of the future city of Chicago.

In a book-shop not a league from where that hut stood I found a volume valued at its weight in gold [Footnote: Thevenot, "Recueil de Voyages," with 2 folding maps and 14 plates, complete. Crown 8vo, white pigskin. Paris 1682. Contains Marquette's and Joliet's Discoveries in North America, etc. For an account of the various editions, see "Jesuit Relations," 59:294-9.] giving the account of the journey in which Marquette had passed up this portage on the way to Green Bay after the discovery of the upper Mississippi with Joliet. It tells in its closing paragraphs of the rich prairies just beyond this portage, but it recites with greater satisfaction the baptizing of a dying child brought to the side of his canoe as he was setting out for the mission house. "Had all this voyage," he said, "caused but the salvation of a single soul I should deem all my fatigue well repaid, and this I have reason to think. For, when I was returning, I passed by the Indians of Peoria, where I was three days announcing the faith, in all their cabins, after which, as we were embarking, they brought me on the water's edge a dying child which I baptized a little before it expired, by an admirable providence, for the salvation of an innocent soul." [Footnote: Shea, "Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi Valley," 2d ed., p. 55.]

That was in 1673. It was more than a year before he again entered the Chicago River, wishing to keep his promise to minister to the Illinois savages and eager "to do and suffer everything for so glorious an undertaking." In the "Jesuit Relations" [Footnote: 59:165-183.] the story of those winter days at the Chicago portage has been kept for all time. All through January his illness obliged him to stay in the portage cabin, but early in February he "commenced Novena (Neufuaine) with a mass, at which Pierre and Jacques [his companions], who do everything they can to relieve me, received communion—to ask God to restore my health." His ailment left him, but weakness and the cold and the ice in the rivers kept him still at the portage until April. On the eve of his leaving for the Illinois the journal ends with this thoughtful word of the French: "If the French procure robes in this country, they do not disrobe the savages, so great are the hardships that must be endured to obtain them." [Footnote: "Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 59:183.]

In the dusk of an autumn day I went out to find the place where the Novena had worked the miracle of his healing. As I have already intimated, few of all the hundreds of thousands there in that great city have had any consciousness of the background of French heroism and suffering and prevision in front of which they were passing daily, but I found that the policemen and the watchmen on the railroad near the river knew at least of the great black cross which stands by that drab and sluggish water, placed there in memory of Marquette and Joliet. The bit of high ground where the hut stood is now surrounded by great looming sheds and factories, which were entirely tenantless when I found my way through a long unlighted and unpaved street in the direction of the river. The cross stood, in a little patch of white, black as the father's cowl, against the night with its crescent moon. I could not make out the inscription on the river side of the monument and, seeing a signal-lantern tied to a scow moored to the bank near by, I untied it and by its light was able to read the tribute of the city to the memory of the priest and the explorer "who first of known white men had passed that way," having travelled, as it recites, "two thousand five hundred miles in canoes in one hundred and twenty days." The bronze plate bears a special tribute to the foresight of Joliet, but it commemorates first of all the dwelling of the frail body and valorous soul of Father Marquette, the first European within the bounds of the city of Chicago. I wish there might be written on Mississippi maps, in that space that is shown between the Chicago and the Des Plaines, or the "Divine River," as it was sometimes called, the words: "Portage St. Jacques." That were a fitter canonization than to put his name among the names of cities, steamboats on the lake, or tobaccos, as is our custom in America. The crescent moon dropped behind the shadows that now line the portage "like a sombre forest," but it is only a few steps through the darkness back into the light and noise of the city of more than two million people.

Out of the black loam of this dark portage path fringed by marshes, in the field of wild onions, the newest of the world's great cities has sprung and spread with a promise that exceeds any other on the face of the planet, though within the life of men still living it was but a stretch of lake shore, a marshy plain with a path from its miniature river or creek toward the crescent moon.

A metropolis was doubtless predestined on or near the very site of Chicago by natural conditions and the peopling of the lands to the northwest; but Louis Joliet was its first prophet. The inscription on the tablet at the foot of the black cross recites that in crossing this site Joliet recommended it for its natural advantages and as a place of first settlement. And he first suggested the lakes-to-the-gulf waterway—a prospect of which La Salle speaks with disfavor but which over two hundred years later was in some measure realized.

The "Jesuit Relation" of August 1, 1674, reporting the conversation of Joliet, who had lost all his precious papers in the Lachine Rapids, makes this interesting prophecy: [Footnote: Thwaite's edition, 58:105.] "It would only be necessary to make a canal by cutting through half a league of prairie, to pass from the foot of the Lake of the Illinois [Michigan] to the River St. Louis [Mississippi].... A bark [built on Lake Erie] would easily sail to the Gulf of Mexico. "The monument to him stands by the canal that has been cut through not merely a league but many leagues (thirty-eight miles) and lets the waters of Michigan flow southward to the Illinois. Of this site Joliet is quoted as saying, "The place at which we entered the lake is a harbor, very convenient for receiving vessels and sheltering them from the wind;" [Footnote: "Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 58:107.] and of the prairies back of the harbor: "At first when we were told of these treeless lands I imagined that it was a country ravaged by fire, where the soil was so poor that it could produce nothing. But we certainly observed the contrary, and no better soil can be found, either for corn, for vines, or for any fruit whatever.... A settler would not there spend ten years in cutting down and burning the trees; on the very day of his arrival he could put his plough into the ground, and if he had no oxen from France, he could use those of this country, or even the animals possessed by the western savages, on which they ride, as we do on horses. After sowing grain of all kinds, he might devote himself especially to planting the vine, and grafting fruit-trees, to dressing ox- hides, wherewith to make shoes; and with the wool of these oxen he could make cloth, much finer than most of that which we bring from France. Thus he could easily find in the country his food and clothing, and nothing would be wanting except salt; but, as he could make provision for it, it would not be difficult to remedy that inconvenience." [Footnote: "Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 58:107-9.] If Marquette was the first martyr of the Illinois, Joliet was the first prophet of that great city of the Illinois.

What he could not foresee was that Lake Michigan would make the Chicago of to-day not so much by giving it a waterway to the markets of the east and Europe as by standing as an obstacle in the way of a straight path to the sea from the northwest fields and so compelling those fertile lands to send all their riches around the southern end of Lake Michigan. He overestimated the economic importance, to be sure, of the buffalo. But if domesticated cattle be substituted for the wild species, he again showed remarkable prevision of the future of a city which has enjoyed a world fame by reason of its cattle-market—its stock-yards. [Footnote: Of the importance of the lakes-to-the-gulf waterway we have already spoken.]

Chicago is a city without a past, save for that glow of adventure which is almost as hazy as the myths or legends that lie back of Europe. It is just eighty-one years since it came into existence as a town, [Footnote: August 12, 1833.] and but twenty-eight voters voted for the first board of trustees of the town; its population was variously estimated at from above two hundred to three hundred and fifty. As a city, it is seventy-seven years old, [Footnote: Chartered March 4, 1837.] beginning its legal life as such with fewer than five thousand people. It was of its first mayor, William B. Ogden—though some years later than his administration—that Guizot, looking upon the portrait of his benevolent face, said: "That is the representative American, who is the benefactor of his country, especially the mighty West; he built Chicago." But the Chicago which he administered was but a small town in size. Its officials from treasurer to scavenger were appointed by the common council and obliged to serve or pay certain fines. Every male resident over twenty-one was obliged to work three days each year on the streets and alleys or pay one dollar for each day. Fire wardens had no compensation except release from jury or military service. There was at first meagre school provision, [Footnote: The money derived from the sale of school lands in 1833 was distributed among the existing private schools which thus became free common schools. Less than $40,000 was received for lands now worth much more than $100, 000,000.] no public sanitary provision, no considerable public service of any sort. It was a neighborly but unsocialized place, where the individual had little restraint save of his own limitations and his personal love of his neighbors. What social functions the city performed were self-protective and not self-improving in motive. For example, fire might not be carried in the street except in a fire-proof vessel. [Footnote: S. E. Sparling, "Municipal History and Present Organization of the City of Chicago," University of Wisconsin Bulletin, No. 23, 1898.] The aboriginal frog croaked on the very site of the place where grand opera is now sung.

The city's development was largely left to the haphazard, unrestrained, but whole-souled, big-hearted, self-confident individualism, such as has been potent in Pittsburgh. The restrictions were mainly those of the prohibitory Mosaic commandments. And so this city, increasing its population by a half-million in each of the last three decades, has come to stand next to Paris in population and first of all great American cities in the constructive activity of its civic consciousness and urban imagination. The city is still smoke-enwrapped (when the wind does not blow from the lake); its streets run out into prairie dust and mud; its harbor, of which Joliet spoke in praise, merits rather the disparagement of La Salle; there are offending smells and sights everywhere. But in the midst of it all and over it all is moving now, as a healing efficacy in troubled waters, a spirit of democratic aspiration. What Louis XIV or Napoleon I or Napoleon III, king and emperors, planned and did, compelling the co-operation of a people in making the city of Paris more beautiful, more habitable, that a people of millions out upon the prairies of Illinois are beginning to do out of their own desire and common treasury.

It is of interest that the sovereign of France who gave her empire of those great stretches of plain, gave to Paris "those vast reaches of avenue and boulevard which to-day are the crowning features of the most beautiful of cities." But it must quicken France's interest further to know that this first systematic planning for a city, as an organic whole, by Louis XIV and Colbert, Le Notre and Blondel is now being followed out on that plain by a self-governing people, who have been making cities for barely half a century, to bring order and form and beauty, and better condition of living out of that grimy collection of homes and shops and beginnings of civic enterprise and great private philanthropies. A great deal has been already accomplished, such as the widening of the leading avenue, the addition of acres upon acres to the park space on the lake shore, the establishment of an efficient small park system; but it is only the beginning of a scheme that thinks of Chicago as a city that will some day hold ten millions of people. The prophecy of one statistician (now of New York) predicts for Chicago a population of thirteen million two hundred and fifty thousand souls in 1952; [Footnote: Bion J. Arnold, "Report of the Engineering and Operating Features of the Chicago Transportation Problem," pp. 95, 96.] and the great railroad builder, James J. Hill, has estimated that "when the Pacific coast shall have a population of twenty millions, Chicago will be the largest city in the world."

The specific plans for its improvement have been developed by a small body of public-spirited citizens, but they are simply that great urban democracy thinking and speaking, trying to express itself. It has developed with less interference or compulsion on the part of the State than any other great city of America, and now it is moving voluntarily to the noblest as well as the most practical of improvements.

Under like leading it built the "White City," the ephemeral city of the World's Fair, in the celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America, and that splendid achievement of the black, unkempt city back of it gave first hint, in the co-operation that made this possible, of what a community could do and at the same time gathered to it the teaching of the older cities of the earth from their long striving for the city beautiful.

The city provides its own water-supply, it lights its streets, it has recently acquired control of its street-car lines, and every passenger is notified as a shareholder that 55 per cent of the profits comes into the city treasury. And now under this inspiration and yet of its own will it has begun a transformation of itself into the likeness of what it dreamed in those evanescent buildings and courts and columns and statues and frescoes out by the opalescent waters of its sea. It saw the reflection of that "White City" in the lake and then the image of its own workaday face —and it has not forgotten what manner of city it was.

Remember again that what is and what is promised have come in a lifetime. Walking in the streets of that city early one morning a few years ago, as the trains were emptying the throngs who sleep outside along the lake and out on the prairie, into the canyons made by its tall buildings, I found myself immediately behind a robust old man, a civil engineer, who was born before Chicago had a hundred inhabitants. He was much older than the city whose buildings now reach out miles from the lake (one of its streets thirty-two miles long) and thirty and forty stories into the air. One hundred years ago it was the French wilderness untouched. Eighty years ago most of its citizens bore French names. The portage path has literally yielded a harvest of streets.

Chicago, the city of the French portage, Chicago, which despite all that casual visitors see and say of it, was, I contend, best defined by Harriet Martineau as a "great, embryo poet," moody, wild, but bringing about results, exulting that he—for he is a masculine poet—has caught the true spirit of things of the past and has had sight of the depths of futurity. But it is only now that the brooding poet is coming to express himself in verses that are recognized for their beauty.

Chicago, the field of the wild onions, threaded by La Riviere de l'Ail, the place of the shambles, the capital of the golden calf. That is her fame.

Only recently I read in a book which I found in Paris, written by an English traveller, that Chicago stands apart from all other cities in that "her people are really on earth to make money"; that, magnificent as she is in many ways, chiefly in distances, she is "too busy money-making to attend to civic improvements" or to have a "keen affection for worthier things."

I have gone a hundred times in and out of that dirty, unkempt city, swept only by the winds, one would think, and I know its worst, its physical, moral, political worst. But if the people there have worshipped the golden calf in their wilderness, they have now drunk of the dust of their first image, and I should be disposed to say that nowhere among American cities is there a keener affection for worthier things showing itself.

Again I shall have to admit that this "affection" is not the spontaneous expression of the entire democratic community. As in Pittsburgh, a comparatively few men have voluntarily, and at their own expense, undertaken to study not only the conditions that make for better and cheaper travel, more profitable commercial intercourse and greater productiveness, but for a more wholesome and a higher spiritual existence. And again it is so with the hope that the great self-governing community will out of its desire and treasury bring about these conditions.

These few men and women, possessed both by a love of that still uncouth city and an ideal objectively learned in the days when the "White City" stood between it and the lakes, have already spent a half-million francs in study and in making plans—in addition to all the months and years of volunteer, unpaid service.

The principal items of this great scheme are:

1. The improvement of the lake front.

2. The creation of a system of highways outside the city.

3. The improvement of railway terminals and the development of a complete traction system for both freight and passengers.

4. The acquisition of an outer park system and of parkway circuits.

5. The systematic arrangement of the streets and avenues within the city, in order to facilitate the movement to and from the business districts.

6. The development of centres of intellectual life and of civic administration, so related as to give coherence and unity to the city.

Is there not hope for democracy if in the places of its greatest strain and stress, in the midst of its fiercest passions, there is a deliberate, affectionate, intelligent striving toward cities that have been revealed not in apocalyptic vision but in the long-studied plans of terrestrial architects and engineers and altruistic souls, such as that of Jane Addams, cities that to such amphionic music shall out of the shards of the past build themselves silently, impregnably—if not in a diviner clime, at any rate in a diviner spirit—on shores and slopes and plains of that broad valley of the new democracy, conterminous in its mountain boundaries with New France in America?

A little while ago some workmen who were digging trenches for the foundations of a new factory or warehouse along that portage path thrust their spades into a piece of wood buried sixteen feet below the surface. It was found to be a fragment of a French bateau, lying on one of whose thwarts was a sword—probably of one who had met his death on the edge of the portage—a sword with an inscription showing that it probably belonged to an early French voyageur.

And so again in these relics but newly brought to light I find new words to remind ourselves that the roots of that mighty, virile, healthiest, most aspiring of America's great cities are entwined about the symbols of French adventure and empire in the west—the sword and the boat, and doubtless there was a crucifix not far away.



CHAPTER XIII

FROM LA SALLE TO LINCOLN

I once heard a public lecturer in America telling a New York audience of an experience in the Mississippi Valley, where he asked an audience of children what body of water lay in the middle of the earth—wishing them to name to him, of course, the Mediterranean Ocean—and unexpectedly got the serious answer from a lad of deep conviction but narrow horizon, "the Sangamon River." I told the amused lecturer, who had never heard of this river, at any rate as locally pronounced, that the lad spoke more truly than the lecturer knew. For to those of even wider horizons, whose greatest and most beloved hero in history lived and was buried near the banks of the Sangamon, it is the middle water of the earth.

It is but a little river, and it is but one of the rivers of the valley of a hundred thousand streams, truly the Medimarenean Land, since all the oceans are now being gathered about it. The Sangamon flows into the Illinois, the Illinois into the Mississippi, and the Mississippi is now to flow into all the seas, even as the life of Lincoln is to flow into all history.

How little competent I am to speak dispassionately of this great incarnation of the spirit of those western waters the distorted geography of the untravelled lad whom the alien lecturer found on the prairies will suggest, for the river of the home and the fame of Lincoln empties into the river of my birth.

It was along this latter river—the Illinois—as we know, that La Salle and his men, in midwinter of 1682, dragged on the ice their canoes, baggage, and disabled companions from the Chicago River, all the way to the site of Fort Crevecoeur, where they found open water, and thence in their canoes made their way past the mouth of the Sangamon (which first appears on the maps of the new world in 1683, just after La Salle's journey, as the River Emicouen) and on into the Mississippi. We recall their "adventurous progress" and the unveiling to their eyes more and more of the vast new world, where the warm and drowsy air and hazy sunlight succeeded the frosty breath of the north. We see them floating down the winding water path. We see the red children of the sun—the Indian sun- worshippers—clothed in white cloaks, receiving the white heralds of Europe; we hear the weather-beaten voyageurs chant on the shores of the gulf solemn, exulting songs learned in church and cloister of France; we hear the faint voice of their leader crying his claim to all the great valley from the mouth of the river to its source beyond the country of the Nadouesioux—the voice not of a human throat alone but of a vision in the wilderness. We discern after long years the sounds of its realization. We see the iridescence of the John Law bubble shining over the turbid waters of that river for a moment. We see the raising and lowering of flags of various colors. We hear Napoleon's representative saying: "May the inhabitants of this valley and a Frenchman never meet upon any spot of the globe without feeling brothers!" We see the general who is later to embody the west's crude democratic ideals, Andrew Jackson, victorious in the last struggle of independence from Europe. We see the red worshippers of the sun in their white cloaks crossing the river, vanishing toward its setting; and we see the black shadows of men, the negro slaves, creeping out of Africa after the white heralds of Europe in America. Seeing and hearing all this, we have seen and heard the intimations of the glory of France in the new world, the birth of a world-power, the United States, the infancy of a new democracy, the disappearance of the aboriginal Indian, the menace of the black shadow that had made a nation half slave and half free, and the prophecy of the triumphant coming of the new-age producers and poets, the men of the Land of the Western Waters.

It is out of this light and shade gathered by the Father of Waters—the Mississippi—along its banks, that there comes silently one day in 1831, the lank, bony, awkward figure of Abraham Lincoln, then a young man of twenty-two, guiding a flatboat laden with prairie products down this same tortuous waterway, from the Sangamon to the sea. He was six feet four inches tall, homely, sad-faced, handy, and as little promising outwardly as any other pilot or boatman of those days. It is still remembered in prairie legends, however, that at the beginning of the voyage, his boat being stuck midway across a dam, he had ingeniously managed to release it and save all from shipwreck. It seems now an incident fraught with prophecy. And it is said that many years later he made designs of a contrivance that would lift flatboats over shoals and even let them navigate on ice—an intimation of the resourcefulness of men left to fight alone with the forces of nature.

He was not a "Yankee," as one writing me in Paris characterized the men of that valley. This awkward landsman on water was born in a cabin in the Kentucky wilderness, a house replaced by one of unhewn timber, without door or floor or window, probably not better than the meanest of the gypsy houses just outside the fortifications of Paris. He accompanied his restless, migratory father from one squatter home to another until he settled in Illinois, where the timber-land and prairie meet, near the Sangamon, and there built another cabin, made rails to fence ten acres of land—which gave him the sobriquet the "rail-splitter"—"broke" the ground, and raised a crop of corn on it the first year. You may remember that Joliet made report of such a possibility there.

Lincoln's origin you will recognize as typical of that frontier, except that the character which asserted itself in the son, if there is transmission of acquired character, seems to have come from the mother and the nurturing of his stepmother rather than from the shiftless, paternal pioneer who gave the wilderness environment and soil to the nurturing of this stock and was as little paternalistic as the government. Perhaps this ne'er-do-well father is to be classed as one of those rough coureurs de bois who, in his ambassadorship from his ancestors to their frontier posterity, forgot the conventions and manners of the ancestral life in the temptations of the open country to a man without a slave. When he started down the Ohio into Indiana with his family, his carpenter's tools, his household goods, and a considerable quantity of whiskey, he was going to treat, not as the coureurs de bois, with the Indians, the savage men of the forests; he was going to treat with the savage forces of nature themselves. And one must, as I have said of Nicolet and Perrot and Du Lhut, judge charitably these men who made the reconciliations of the edges of things. They made the paths to western cities; he, to a western character; that only need be remembered.

Certain trees depend for the spread of their kind on seeds equipped with spiral wings that when they fall they may reach the ground outside the shadow of the parent tree and so have a chance to grow into wide-spreading trees. Thomas Lincoln, the father of Abraham, was as the spirals that carried the precious seed where it could have free air and an unshadowed soil to grow in.

And there the tuition of the experiences that made all men kin and so made a natural democracy possible began. He had little teaching of the formal sort. Six months or a year in a log schoolhouse probably measured its duration. He had the sterner discipline of the fields, the waters, and the trees, for their very temptations became disciplines to those who resisted, as his father did not. He learned his parables of the fields and of the natural instincts of his neighbors. He knew both physical and human nature about him, and this he illustrated, expressed, in such manner as to make him a faithful and favorite exponent of its coarseness, its kindliness, its gallantry, its sympathies, and its heroisms.

These neighborly fellowships, not affected but genuine, equipped him not only with a vital and never-failing sense of brotherhood but with a faith in those whom he called the "plain people," the common man. His creed was, if not innate, innurtured. That fellowship and that faith were at the bottom of his democracy—not merely patient love of his neighbors but faith in their ultimate judgments—democracy that made him a nationalist and a world humanist.

But in the making of Lincoln there were more than the usual disciplines. He had also the tuition of the "solemn solitude," as Bancroft says. He sought the fellowships of the past—of that "invisible multitude of the spirits of yesterday." He read every book that he could get within fifty miles, it is said. But what is more certain is that he read thoroughly and "inwardly digested" a few books. He knew the Bible, Shakespeare, and Burns, Aesop's "Fables," Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," and "Robinson Crusoe." He read a history of the United States and a life of Washington, and he learned by heart the statutes of the State of Indiana. Moreover, he studied without guidance algebra and geometry. It is said that later in life, when his political career was beginning, he continued his studies even more seriously and attempted to master a foreign language.

So he had companionship of the patriarchs and prophets and poets of Israel. And it was the experience of many another prairie boy that he knew intimately these Asiatic heroes of history before he consciously heard of modern or contemporary heroes. I knew of Joshua before I was aware of Napoleon, and I remember carving upon a primitive arch of triumph—which was only the stoop at the roadside, but the most, conspicuous public place accessible to my knife—the name of one of the cities taken in the conquest of Canaan, an instinct of hero-worship—so splendidly illustrated in French art and monuments.

Lincoln the youth had not only those ancient companionships but the intimate counsel of the greatest of teachers of democracy. He knew, too, the homely wisdom of Greece as well as he knew the treasured sayings of his own people handed on from generation to generation. He was as familiar with the larger-horizoned gossip and philosophies of Shakespeare's plays as with those which gathered around the post-office of Clary's Grove, where later this youth as postmaster carried the letters in his hat and read the newspapers before they were delivered. He loved Burns for his philosophy that "a man's a man for a' that." So with these and others he found his high fellowships, even while he "swapped" stories (enriched of his reading) with his neighbors at the store or his fellow lawyers at the primitive taverns.

But there were less personal associations. He made the fundamental laws of a wilderness State an acquisition of his instincts. There is preserved in a law library in New York the much-worn copy of the statutes of Indiana enacted in the first years of the existence of that State. It is stated that he learned these statutes by copying extracts from them—and from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Ordinance of the Northwest, included in the same volume—on a shingle when paper was scarce, using ink made of the juice of brier-root and a pen made from the quill of a turkey-buzzard, and shaving the shingle clean for another extract when one was learned, till his primitive palimpsest was worn out. But whatever the medium of their transmigration from matter to mind, they became the law of his democracy, sacred as if they had been brought to him on tables of stone by a prophet with shining face. It was in that school, I believe, that he learned his nationalism, his devotion to the Constitution—to which in maturer years he gave this famed expression: "I would save the Union, I would save it in the shortest way under the Constitution.... My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union, and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union." [Footnote: Letter to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862.]

And when he had freed the negro by a proclamation that violated the letter of the Constitution, it was still that boy of the woods speaking in the man—the boy who had learned his lesson beyond all possibility of forgetting or misunderstanding—"I felt that measures otherwise unconstitutional might become lawful by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution through the preservation of the nation."

It was from those shingles that he learned, too, the place of the State in this nationalism. Its paternalism has grown tremendously since 1824, when democracy was a negative, a repressive and not a positive, aggressive political and social spirit, but, as it was, it gave him the foundation of the political structure within whose lines he had to build later.