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.
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