Niagara Falls 



1906 as a doubting lover believes in his mistress — in the future of 

 mankind. And so to me it seems altogether well that all the froth 

 and hurry of Niagara at last, all of it, dying into hungry canals of 

 intake, should rise again in light and power, in ordered and 

 equipped and proved and beautiful humanity, in cities and palaces 

 and the emancipated souls and hearts of men. 



I turned back to look at the power-house as I walked towards 

 the falls, and halted and stared. Its architecture brought me 

 out of my day-dream to the quality of contemporary things again. 

 You know, it is such an inconceivably dull piece of building — 

 a box of bricks exterior for these engineering splendors — a 

 shock, a scandal like a bowler-hat on the king of kings. What 

 an architect! I'd almost as soon have had one of the Schoellkopf 

 sheds. 



For a time my prophetic mood was altogether damped. 



A community that can produce such things as those turbines 

 and dynamos, and then cover them over with this dull exterior, 

 is capable, one feels, of a feat of bathos. One feels that all the 

 power that throbs in the copper cables below may end at last in 

 turning great wheels for excursionists, stamping out aluminum 

 fancy-ware, and the illumination of night advertisements for drug- 

 shops and music-halls. I had an afternoon of busy doubts. . . . 



There is much discussion about the question of Niagara at 

 present. It may be some queer compromise, based on the pretence 

 that a voluminous waterfall is necessarily a thing of incredible 

 beauty, and a human use is necessarily a degrading use, will 

 *' save " Niagara and the hack-drivers and the souvenir-shops for 

 series of years yet, " a magnificent monument to the pride of the 

 United States in a glory of nature," as one journalistic savior puts 

 it. It is, as public opinion stands, a quite conceivable thing. This 

 electric development may be stopped after all, and the huge fall 

 of water remain surrounded by gravel paths and parapets and 

 geranium-beds, a staring-point for dull wonder, a crown for days' 

 excursion, a thunderous impressive accessory to the vulgar love- 

 making that fills the surrounding hotels, a Titanic imbecility of 



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