rg in material production--iron, steel,
coke, glass, and all the rest of it--can only be told in colossal
figures that are almost as hard to realize in our minds as the figures
of astronomical distance or geologic time. It is not quite clear that
all the founders of the Commonwealth would have surveyed the wonderful
scene with the same exultation as their descendants. Some of them would
have denied that these great centers of industrial democracy either in
the Old World or in the New always stand for progress. Jefferson said,
"I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the
liberties of man. I consider the class of artificers," he went on, "as
the panders of vice, and the instrument by which the liberties of a
country are generally overthrown." In England they reckon 70 per cent.
of our population as dwellers in towns. With you, I read that only 25
per cent. of the population live in groups so large as 4,000 persons. If
Jefferson was right our outlook would be dark. Let us hope that he was
wrong, and in fact toward the end of his time qualified his early view.
Franklin, at any rate, would, I feel sure, have reveled in it all.
That great man--a name in the forefront among the practical
intelligences of human history--once told a friend that when he dwelt
upon the rapid progress that mankind was making in politics, morals, and
the arts of living, and when he considered that each one improvement
always begets another, he felt assured that the future progress of the
race was likely to be quicker than it had ever been. He was never
wearied of foretelling inventions yet to come, and he wished he could
revisit the earth at the end of a century to see how mankind was getting
on. With all my heart I share his wish. Of all the men who have built up
great States, I do believe there is not one whose alacrity of sound
sense and single-eyed beneficence of aim could be more safely trusted
than Franklin to draw light from the clouds and pierce the economic and
political confusions of our time. We can imagine the amazement and
complacency of that shrewd benignant mind if he could watch all the
giant marvels of your mills and furnaces, and all the apparatus devised
by the wondrous inventive faculties of man; if he could have foreseen
that his experiments with the kite in his garden at Philadelphia, his
tubes, his Leyden jars would end in the electric appliances of
to-day--the largest electric plant in all the world
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