It was of the Free City they had dreamed and that they had not lived to behold the fulfillment of their dream was, in its way, the final certification of the validity of their services as pioneers. It is an old rule of life, or an old trick of the fates that seem so casually to govern life, that the dreams of mortals are seldom destined to come true, though mortals sometimes thwart the fates by finding their dreams in themselves sufficient. In this sense Jones and Johnson had already been rewarded. It had been a dream of wonder and of beauty, the vision of a city stately with towers, above which there hung the glow which poor Jude used to see at evening when he climbed to the roof of the Brown House on the ridgeway near Marygreen. It was a city in which there were the living conceptions of justice, pity, mercy, consideration, toleration, beauty, art, all those graces which mankind so long has held noblest and most dear. It was a city wherein human life was precious, and therefore gracious, a city which the citizen loved as a graduate loves his alma mater, a city with a communal spirit. There the old ideas of privilege had given way to the ideals of service, public property was held as sacred as private property, power was lightly wielded, the people’s voice was intelligent and omnipotent, for they had learned the wisdom that confuses demagogues, and amid the interplay of myriad forces, the democratic spirit was ever at work, performing its noble functions. You might have said that the people were inspired, since they united so readily in great constructive work, reducing to order and scientific arrangement all the manifold needs and expressions of the daily life, conquering in the old struggle against nature, providing against all that casualty and accident which make life to-day such a snarl of squalid tragedies and ridiculous comedies that it well may seem to be ruled by none other than the most whimsical and spiteful of irresponsible spirits. It was more than a city indeed, it was a realm of reason, wherein the people at last in good will were living a social life. The eternal negative, the everlasting no, had given way to a new affirmation; each morning should ordain new emancipations, and each evening behold new reconciliations among men. It was a city wherein the people were achieving more and more of leisure, that life in all her splendor and her beauty and her glory might not pass by unhailed, unrecognized even, by so many toiling thousands. It was the vision of a city set upon a hill, with happy people singing in the streets.