, 1921-11-10
AMERICAN RUINS.

zone of our new foreign visitors in the vanguard
of a delegation to the Washington conference on the
Limitation of ornaments" remarks the Chicago News
has remarked on the strangeness he feels in n coun-
try in which the inhabited places seem usually so new
ly inhabited and in which he seldom encounters n com
munity that seems to consist principally of reminis
cences of some former and departed population. Such
\ thought is almost certain to strike a foreigner, and
is often found even in the minds of natives. Yet the
fact is, of course, that in this new country of ours
there Is a certain region containing a larger area of
outright surrender to the past and Of outright desola-
ton in the present than could easily be pointed out
anywhere in Europe.
"In Europe there are ruins-of cities, castles, tenn
pies, roads and many other sorts Of human structural
work; but about them and even on top of them one
usually finds contemporary structures for a living
population or else very actively cultivated fields and
crops. Nowhere in any European country within the
range OF familiar travel is there any scene of former
activities and of present mere "reminiscences COM
parable in extent to the one that stretches through
middle New England. and that comes to its closing
note of neglect is overgrown woodland roads as lone
ly as the Roman forum is popuous.
Through forests seemingly untouched, these roads
run often in such a network Of circles and crisscrosses
tat at last the stone walls that run beside them be-
gin to suggest out of their tangles of shrubs and
bushes the thought that presently is confirmed by or
chards still showing straight lines of planting in the
midst Of the wilderness, by pastures that still lie open
to the sun on the tops of great hills, and by stone cell
lars denuded of their houses, but still distinguishable
from the cutters of powders about>them. This for
est is not a primeval forest These roads are not the
casual tracks Of hunters and %trappers. Here once was
a thriving, settled life-farms, homes, markets,
churches, schools, and, by means of these many roads,
a frequent intercourse Of commerce, government,
town meeting liberties, revolutionary risings.
Here a people of British stock advanced mile after
mile in a fight won inch by inch against the forest.
Here they made a prosperous, elf-sustaining country
side made it, lived in it, produced in it the philosophy
that produced the battle line at Lexington, and then,
when the competition Of the new land of the Missis-
sippi valley made their rocky fields untenable, moved
on into the west, not British any longer, but
American.
"Such spots are the true shrines Of this republic. In
them grow, and out of them came, the spirit thai.
saved the west for the union, and so saved .Se unias
for the world. The spots in New England that are str
thickly peopled are New England. The spots that are
enptied are America.
"A foreign observer might walk them for many a
year before he had walked them all. In the end he
would say: The strangsst thing in the newness of this
country is that it holds vaster spaces than have been
noted in any of its mother countries of cultivated
populated land wrung from the wilderness and re-
turned to the wilderness.'"