Page:The national monument to Abraham Lincoln.djvu/6

Rh Washington a capital of peace and beauty. The circles have become, in the process of the city's de- velopment, breathing-places, flower-gardens, and beauty- rather than Vintage- points of military power.

The Capitol, the most important and impressive building in the western world, was located where it is by L'Enfant. Here again we stumble upon another of those curious accidents which have so often interfered with the literal development of the founder's plan. L'Enfant faced his Capitol toward the wast looking out upon the fine plateau which is summit of Capitol Hill. It was his purpose and Washington‘s expectation that the city should lie in that direction. So the west front of the Capitol, as first erected, was backed up rather ungracefully to the declivity of Capitol Hill, and was about as attractive us the rear View of a present-day storage- warehousue

But the best laid plans of of mice and men and land- scape engineers sometimes miscarry. A coterie o real estate speculator confi- dent tha some day there would be several thousand people in Washington, pro- ceded to corner the sightly property to the east of the Capitol, and to hold it for prices so high that the town was compelled to grow in prexisely the opposite di— rection,

GENERAL VIEW OF THE LINCOLN MONUMENT FROM A POINT ABOUT ONE THOUSAND FEET DISTANT—THE COLONADE IS TO BE ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-EIGHT FEET LONG, CONSISTING OF WHITE MARBLE COLUMNS FORTY-FOUR FEET HIGH

In the end, however, as: with Major L'Enfant's spattering of circular mili- tary reservations, the event proved that destiny and the real-estate sharps had worked together to achieve an even better result than