I think it
not unlikely that eventually the demos, thinking of the future, will be as
paternalistic as was Louis XIV, who told the habitant of the St. Lawrence
how many horses he should keep.
This review of the resources of the valley of France in the midst of
America, and of the forces that are now assembling to preserve for
posterity its vast capital of earth, air, and water, is but an intimation
of what might easily be expanded into a volume of itself. Indeed, much of
my statistical material I have from a book by Doctor Charles R. Van Hise,
president of the University of Wisconsin; but, meagre as this review is,
it must give you, as it has given me, a stirring sense of the mighty reach
of the paths of those few pioneers of France in those regions where the
spirit of conservation is strongest.
While it is true that every human life, as Carlyle has said, stands at the
conflux of two eternities--the one behind him, the other before--in a
sense have the material preparations, extending during a length of time
that to our measurement seems an eternity, converged upon and in those
pioneers of Europe in that valley; and from them has diverged a
civilization that now begins to look forward in the eyes of her prophets
through years that seem as another eternity.
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