Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/389

 something quite otherwise than that which they were at first or were intended to be.

No, neither for them, nor for us, had the dream come true. But it had come nearer. It had become possible. Many obstacles had been removed; many purifications had been wrought, many deliverances achieved. To Cleveland and to Toledo, those two cities by the lake, the years had brought their changes. Not objectively, perhaps; outwardly they were much the same—without form, inharmonious, ugly, with the awful antitheses of our economic system, and what is worse, the vast welter of mediocrity and banality between. But there had been ameliorations. In each of them there were plans traced for beautiful civic centers with groups of buildings and other public amenities, which, when realized, would render them comparable in that respect to those old cities of Europe where the benison of art has descended on the people from the hands of kings. And these things were coming up out of the people, despite provincialism and philistinism and politics; there was a new understanding of sovereignty, not as a menace descending from above, but as an aspiration coming up from below. And this new aspiration in the people, pressing with the irresistible urge of moral sentiment against old institutions will renovate the cities and recreate the lives in them.

For after all the world grows better. Not as rapidly as we should like, but yet, in a way, better. The immense sophistication of the modern mood, to be sure, is apt to cast contemporary thought in