Preservation of the Falls 



and other obtruders of petty and often needless services, with their 1885 

 small, but continual exactions, make up a sum of disturbing and arter 

 irritating influences which tend to supplant with resentment and 

 disgust, the high emotions which the scene would otherwise inspire. 

 It was this degradation of the surroundings of Niagara which 

 induced the effort of which we celebrate to-day the successful 

 accomplishment. The residents of this neighborhood, justly proud 

 of the possession of a great natural spectacle of sublimity and 

 beauty which drew to them visitors from every part of the civilized 

 world, the fond votaries of the scene, long accustomed to resort 

 to it ; and to study its features until they had 



" Got by heart 

 Its eloquent of proportions " — 



took alarm at the progress of the devastation. They knew, 

 indeed, that the mighty floods from those inland seas could never 

 be arrested, nor the thunders of the cataract silenced by human 

 power : 



" Man marks the earth with ruin — his control 

 Stops with the shore." 



But they saw that the glorious framework of the divine picture 

 was fragile as a web of gossamer, and that although the scene 

 itself could never be destroyed, it might be disenchanted. They 

 had learned also that much of the rare beauty of leaf, tree and 

 flower, which seems to cling as if by some preference around the 

 cataract, springs from conditions created by itself, and is, there- 

 fore, if I may borrow the fine language in which the thought has 

 been expressed, " a part of its own majesty," and that to strip 

 it of these glorious robes would be a dismemberment, leaving the 

 great image a colossal deformity. 



The circumstances which have thus tended to excite regret and 

 even to arouse resentment in the hearts of the lovers of this great 

 spectacle all over the world, could not, indeed, be imputed to the 

 community which inhabited its neighborhood. They are such as 



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