The things we do!

Of the guests, one, the president
of another important railroad, was once a farm boy, then a freight
brakeman in that same western State; another, the president of one of the
longest railroads, was the son of a stone-mason out in that valley;
another, the head of the Interborough system of New York, also a prairie-
born boy; another, president of the greatest southern railroad, was born
at the mouth of the Mississippi; and still another, one of the wealthiest
men in the world, was at one time a messenger boy and telegraph operator
just over the mountains on the site of Fort Duquesne. Only one man of the
company of nearly twenty men, assembled without thought of origin, had
been born in New York. All had come from the country or from across the
water, and most of them from the great Mississippi Valley. I speak of this
while discussing the railroad, because it is their paths through the
valley of the French that have made this phenomenon possible.
I have spoken of what the wheel has done in making the permanence of one
republic of such an area a possibility.


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