PARK AND CEMETERY . 
298 
If this visitor from Mars went into 
our homes and lives, his amazement 
would increase. Wealth he would 
find in abundance and a certain love 
for beauty; but he would see the rich 
men of Pittsburg, for instance, mak- 
ing vile and ugly open sewers out of 
their own lovely rivers, from which 
also they would drink, until typhoid- 
scared into better sense; and then he 
would see these same people rush to 
Europe, there to spend vast sums in 
beauty travel along waterways quite 
as commercial as their own Alle- 
gheny, but with an appreciated by- 
product of undestroyed scenery 
hardly as fine as that which they had 
been thoughtlessly desecrating. And 
the men of Pittsburg are not alone 
in this search for beauty abroad. 
They jostle the American throng 
which crowds the Atlantic ferries — 
men of Chicago and Denver, of Bos- 
ton and Omaha, of Buffalo and Mo- 
bile — all intent on seeing abroad, at 
the cost of many annual millions, the 
beauty of city and country, of lake 
and mountain and river, which they 
have not considered but consumed, 
at home. 
Should the man from Alars study 
further into American economics 
and become acquainted with our pro- 
tective tariff might he not well sug- 
gest a new need for tariff protection 
— the protection of American scen- 
ery? And if he heard of our now 
lusty “infant industries” would it be 
amiss for him to wonder that we dis- 
regard so considerably the industry 
of showing scenery in America, while 
we spend in little Europe three times 
as many travel millions as we re- 
ceive each year. 
To be sure, we now have the 
grandest waterways of the world, but 
our “civilization” has taken little note 
of the value of their beauty. Nia,gara 
draws the world by its majesty, but 
we are hard pressed to keep our citi- 
zens from draining its torrent to turn 
their private wheels, or to stop them 
from using its wondrous gorge as a 
public dump. We have the Hudson, 
and we blast its Palisades for easy 
building stone, while thousands of 
our people spend millions to see the 
less beautiful but not abused Rhine. 
The noble harbor of New York is 
unparalleled, but we ruin it with 
messy and inefficient piers and with 
the newest ugliness of iron docks, 
while our thoughtless beauty trav- 
elers gaze admiringly upon the or- 
derly water-fronts of Hamburg and 
Liverpool. 
The Mississippi’s grandeur as a 
waterway is always on our tongues. 
but we say nothing to foreign vis- 
itors of the beauty of the commercial 
frontage of Minneapolis, St. Paul, St. 
Louis, Cincinnati, Memphis or New 
Orleans upon the Father of Waters. 
In fact, we would need to call the 
connection betw.een shore and river 
in most American navigable waters 
. “backage” rather than frontage, for it 
usually resembles an unkempt and 
unpleasant slum back yard. 
Do we use these navigable water- 
ways, which we have so sparingly de- 
veloped, in such a way as to obtain 
the inestimable advantage of water 
scenery for our great buildings? If 
so, where? To be sure, we know what 
beauty value there is in such frontage, 
since Burnham’s genius and Chicago’s 
fine spirit gave us both lake shore 
and Court of Honor in the White City 
in 1893, but the sense of ordered water 
beauty then before us must have been 
still-born, for it seems not to have 
grown into any concrete and perma- 
nent works in connection with com- 
merce. New York is proud of her 
vast ugliness of iron sheds in the 
New Chelsea improvement now near- 
ing completion; but in Stockholm the 
Royal Palace, the Houses of Parlia- 
ment, the National Art Gallery and 
the finest hotel face upon the busy 
commerce that passes from Lake Ma- 
laren to the Baltic. 
It is an American boast that a 
greater commerce streams through 
the Detroit River than through any 
other waterway of the world. But the 
passing traveler may be glad for the 
spreading smoke which hides the 
formless squalor of a great city’s 
water front from his eyes while he 
remembers how attractive are equiva- 
lent conditions in less-favored Rotter- 
dam and Amsterdam. 
Along the Thames the Victoria em- 
bankment adds glory to London, 
while the historic Tower and the ma- 
jestic dome of St. Paul’s are in the 
river’s eye. Along the Chicago River 
and the Milwaukee River two Ameri- 
can cities distribute their worst archi- 
tecture and fill its facades with bill- 
board appeals to buy pills and beer, 
crackers and whiskey. 
The Seine is a panorama of beauty, 
and with the Grand Canal of Venice, 
probably extracts more American dol- 
lars from a people whose beauty hun- 
ger requires a sea voyage to develop 
than do any otlier navigable water- 
ways in all the world. Buffalo has 
the Niagara, and Philadelphia has the 
Delaware, but no one ever heard of 
a dollar’s worth of beauty travel ap- 
pertaining to either within the limits 
of these great cities. True, both 
places, and Toledo and Cleveland and 
. Toronto as well, have an excursion 
travel of no small volume; but that 
travel is to get away from the cities 
named, the water fronts of which arc 
so repellantly ugly. 
Even when we dig a great water- 
way, we seem to forget its beautj" pos- 
sibilities. The docks and locks at 
Panama are as yet unbeautiful, but 
we shall hope for the birth and 
growth of that form of national pride 
which will seek to show a commercial 
waterway as pleasing as our World’s 
Fair Court of Honor was noble. 
Now all this criticism, based on the 
visible facts of the case, would be use- 
less if it were merely to point out de- 
ficiencies and shortcomings. But we 
are undoubtedly to go into the busi- 
ness of making navigable waterways. 
We are to deepen rivers and harbors, 
and to dig canals. But one mile in 
fifteen of our possible navigable 
waterways is now developed, we are 
told. Can we not -have, in this great 
national work, some consideration of 
the value of beauty in waterways? 
Will our canals continue to be 
trenches only, our river improvements 
go on destroying natural beauty, our 
new harbors to be built into ugliness? 
Will we save money in inland water 
transportation, and then spend it 
crossing the oceans to Japan and to 
Europe to get away from our own 
uncommercial, uneconomic, wasteful 
ugliness? Will we longer neglect the 
vast travel tribute to beauty which 
we might attract from tire rest of the 
world as well as from our own peo- 
ple? 
Aside from the sheer economic 
value of beauty in waterways — value 
in enhanced price of abutting proper- 
ties, in the stimulated travel tide, 
there is a great value — the spiritual 
value of beauty, its beneficent effect 
on our workaday lives. Who would 
suggest that the Congress of the 
United States could do better work 
if removed to the center of Chicago’s 
stock yards? Vast sums have been 
spent and it befits the national effi- 
ciency that larger sums shall yet be 
spent, in making majestically fine the 
seat of the nation’s government. It 
has been well said that public beauty 
excites that love of country which 
is at the very foundation of true pa- 
triotism. 
So I insist that in its stimulating 
effect on love of country alone, en- 
tirely aside from the sheer economic 
value of it, considered beauty of 
waterways will be well worth while. 
And in its restful effect upon the 
