Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 8.djvu/282

 and heart, have as their nucleus the best of our past selves and are filled out by our best civic aspirations. These are visualized and symbolized in the columns in our streets. They are our embodied ideals and serve as the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night.

To evoke co-operation in our onward march as a community, to get concerted volition for the highest, we must have as did the Children of Israel of old some tangible symbol, or token, of God's spirit in us leading us on.

Now nothing soul-stirring or that affected the destiny of the State or the Nation at large ever happened with the environs of Eugene. The leading events in the history of Eugene were humble and undramatic occurrences. Yet the fact that they appealed to the Native Daughters bespeaks for these a higher order of patriotism than would a similar re- sponse if there had been something more dramatic and con- spicuous to commemorate.

The conditions are simply these a community that is going to move onward and upward in its civic life must honor what was best in its past. It must build on that best. To ignore it is to make a failure. To gain in community strength and character it must live a consecutive life. A city that does not utilize what is best in its past builds on the sand. It will forever grovel in the dirt and be wretchedly poor in all that pertains to the higher life and to all that makes life worth living. The community that sticks up its nose at its yesterdays will soon never have any todays nor any tomorrows in prospect that it can respect. Such a community is not unlike the man who on Saturday night has so .little regard for his week's earnings that he 1 1 blows them in ' ' for that which can do him no good.

The building of Skinner's cabin on the west end of the butte, the organization of the first court for trial procedure on what was later the Titus block, and the founding of Colum- bia College on what is now College Hill, all represent begin- nings of the elements of an order of life on this soil of the upper Willamette far higher than any it had ever known