"
This, then, is what France has prepared the way for, in one of the vast
regions where she was pioneer in America. Through the venture and the
faith of her sons she won the valley with a past of a million of ages;
through unrecorded valors she held it as her very own for a century, and,
though she lost nominal title to it as a territory, she has a ground-rent
interest in it, real title to a share in its human fruitage, which time
can neither take away nor cloud but only augment.
The social and industrial life which has developed there by mere
coincidence, or of direct cause, is distinctive and peculiar to that part
of the United States which has a French background, though it now has made
itself felt throughout the nation. And, however little in its feature and
language the foreground may seem to take color of it, I shall always
believe that the consecration of the rivers and paths, by explorations and
ministries that were for the most part as unselfish as France's
scholarship is to-day, must in some subtle way have had such a potency as
the catalytic substances which work miracles in matter and yet are beyond
the discerning of the scientist.
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