The things we do!

Through those very rapids a single fleet of boats carries every year
enough iron ore to supply every man, woman, and child in the United States
(97,000,000) with a new iron kettle every year; another fleet bears enough
to meet the continent's, if not the world's, need of hatchets. Trains
laden with golden grain, more precious than beads, trains that would
encircle the palace at Versailles or the Louvre now cross that narrow
strait every day. A track of iron, bearing the abbreviated name of the
rapids and the mission, penetrates the forests and swamps from which that
savage congregation was gathered in the first great non-religious
convocation on the shores of the western lakes where men with the
scholarship of the Sorbonne now march every year with emblems of learning
on their shoulders.
As to the proclamation, Parkman asks, what now remains of the sovereignty
it so pompously announced? "Now and then," he answers, "the accents of
France on the lips of some straggling boatman, or vagabond half-breed--
this and nothing more.


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