The things we do!

The city is on every boy's horizon.
Its glow is in every prairie sky at twilight.
When a boy on those silent plains I had my Horace and my Euripides in the
field. The unattainable eternal cities lent their charm and glory to the
valley whose childhood horizon I had not crossed. But now no country boy
thinks of the ancient or the mediaeval. It is the nearer city and
civilization that impress the imagination. The valedictorian of a class,
graduating as I entered college, told me a few months ago that he was
building a trolley-line in Rome, and that, after all, Falernian wine, of
which we who had never tasted wine out in that vineless region thought as
some drink of the gods, was very bitter.
I have hinted at what the wheel has done, in what it carries, to make all
look alike and think alike and act alike, but there is one supreme service
that must have mention. In that country when travel was slow we had a
representative government. But while we still have the same form, the
wheel has made possible, and so necessary, a more democratic government.


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