I walked, in the afternoon of the last day of the old year 1910, entirely
around the old city of Paris by way of its fortifications, in a circle
three kilometres longer of radius, within a few hours encompassing a
ground, rich in what it yields to-day in fruits of art, literature, and
science--of indefatigable, intellectual industry and imagination--but
richer than its inhabitants know in what has grown upon the billion acres
which it has lifted out of the ocean, [Footnote: For it will be remembered
that to geographers before Cartier this Mississippi Valley was but a sea,
even as ages before it actually was.] and given as a soil where
civilization could gather its forces from all peoples and begin afresh on
the problems of the individual and society.
It is a new view of Paris, I know. No historian of the United States has,
so far as I am aware, presented it. Yet I think it is not a distorted
vision which enabled me, looking in from the old fortifications, to see
Paris not merely as the capital of art and of a great modern language and
literature, as those who live there see her, nor as the centre of gayety
and frivolity, as so many of my own countrymen see her, but as the parent
of fruitful wildernesses, as a patron of pioneers, as the divinity of the
verges, as the godmother of a frontier democracy.
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