Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 5.djvu/248

 THE WORLD'S FAMOUS ORATIONS

the Pacific to the forty-third degree of latitude, that was one of the most far-reaching facts of modern history, tho it almost escaped the eyes of Europe^-all her perceptions then monopolized by affairs in the Levant. Who can say? Many courses of the sun were needed before men could take the full historic measures of Luther, Calvin, Knox; the measure of Loyola, the Council of Trent, and all the counter-reformation. The center of gravity is forever shifting, the political axis of the world perpetually changing. But we are now far enough off to discern how stu- pendous a thing was done when, after two cycles of bitter war, one foreign, the other civil and intestine, Pitt and Washington, within a span of less than a score of years, planted the founda- tions of the American Republic.

What Forbes 's stockade at Fort Pitt has grown to be you know better than I. The huge triumphs of Pittsburg 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 astro- nomical 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 212

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