The old French forts have grown into new-world cities, the portage paths
have been multiplied into streets, the trails of the coureurs de bois have
become railroads, and all are the noisy, flaming, smoky places and means
of such an industry and exploitation as doubtless are not to be found so
extensive and so intensive in any other valley of the earth.
A quantitative analysis has led me to present statistics of its production
and manufacture which would seem inexcusably braggart if it were not to
remind the French and my own countrymen that it was the geographical
descendants of France who, out of the wealth of their heritage of France's
bequeathing, untouched from the glaciers and the Indians, were confuting
with their wheat the prophecies of Malthus and making the whole world a
more comfortable and a somewhat brighter place with their iron, their oil,
their reapers, their wagons, and their sewing-machines. It were nothing to
be ashamed of unless that were all.
But a careful qualitative analysis discovers in the life of that valley,
which has been so widely advertised by its purely quantitative output, a
certain idealism that is usually obscured by the smoke of its
individualism.
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