But that is the spirit of youth in those overgrown, awkward cities that are only now beginning to be self-conscious and seriously purposeful in doing more than the things conventionally and for the most part selfishly done by cities generally. In the conjugation of their busy, noisy life they do not often use the past tense, never the past-perfect, and they have had for the most part little concern as to the future, except the rise in real-estate values and the retaining of markets. When in Pittsburgh I asked a prominent man, of French ancestry, why the people did not keep from the destroying hand of private enterprise the site of old Fort Duquesne (the fecund plot from which the great city had grown), and he said it was all they could do to keep the little blockhouse that remained of Fort Pitt, filling a space a few yards square. What claim has the past as against the needs of industry in the present? That was the attitude of that grimy individualism born in "barefoot square" or in "slab alley," in the land of smoke and flame and "rusty rivers." And the future? Well, the voice of the French priest and of those ministers of his own and other faiths that have followed in his footsteps is still heard there crying of the world to come. Several years ago on my way into that valley, on one of those fast trains that tie the east and west together, we came shrieking, thundering down the mountain slopes in the dusk of the day, past Jumonville's grave, past Braddock's field, past miles on miles of glowing coke-ovens, past acres upon acres of factories with their thousands of lighted windows, past flaming towers and chimneys into the midst of the modern babel, the tops of whose buildings were hidden in smoke, when suddenly, above the noise and clangor of whistles and wheels, I heard the rich, deep voice of a cathedral bell telling that the priest was still at the side of the explorer and trader and the iron coureur de bois. It is not, however, of the celestial but of the terrestrial future that I am permitted to speak. For, as I intimated, these young cities of the west, only a half-century old as cities--children by the side of Paris, London, Rome--are beginning seriously to take thought of the morrow, not simply of multiplying their numbers nor of sending their multitudes back to the country but of giving them prospect and promise of a better, more comfortable, more wholesome life, capable of a higher individual and collective development within the city. For while cities have been preached against since the time when Jonah cried against Nineveh, and while cities have perished and have been buried, even as Nineveh, the generic city, the assembling of gregarious men, continues and increases.