A young man, born son of a stone-mason in that valley, who has been
successively a student, clerk, lawyer, solicitor-general of a great
railroad, its president, and later the head of an industry that is
carrying electricity over the world, said to me not long ago that he was
building a trolley-line in Rome. It seemed a profanation. But if the
titular function of the official who holds the highest spiritual office
there was once the care of bridges (Pontifex Maximus), will the higher
utilization of those bridges not be some day made as poetic, as spiritual,
as high a function of state and society?
I see that son of the stone-mason, with blanched face and set jaw, facing
and quelling a body of strikers threatening to tear up the tracks along
the Chicago River, as brave as Horatius at the bridge across the Tiber.
There is a vivid picture of democracy's greatest problem in that valley.
Then I see him flinging almost in a day a new bridge across the Tiber.
There is a companion picture, a gleam of democracy's poesy.
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