Calvin, Knox; the measure of Loyola, the Council of Trent, and all the counter-reformation.  The center of gravity is forever shifting, the political axis of the world perpetually changing.  But we are now far enough off to discern how stupendous a thing was done when, after two cycles of bitter war, one foreign, the other civil and intestine, Pitt and Washington, within a span of less than a score of years, planted the foundations of the American Republic.

What Forbes’s stockade at Fort Pitt has grown to be you know better than I. The huge triumphs of Pittsburg in material production—­iron, steel, coke, glass, and all the rest of it—­can only be told in colossal figures that are almost as hard to realize in our minds as the figures of astronomical distance or geologic time.  It is not quite clear that all the founders of the Commonwealth would have surveyed the wonderful scene with the same exultation as their descendants.  Some of them would have denied that these great centers of industrial democracy either in the Old World or in the New always stand for progress.  Jefferson said, “I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health, and the liberties of man.  I consider the class of artificers,” he went on, “as the panders of vice, and the instrument by which the liberties of a country are generally overthrown.”  In England they reckon 70 per cent. of our population as dwellers in towns.  With you, I read that only 25 per cent. of the population live in groups so large as 4,000 persons.  If Jefferson was right our outlook would be dark.  Let us hope that he was wrong, and in fact toward the end of his time qualified his early view.  Franklin, at any rate, would, I feel sure, have reveled in it all.

That great man—­a name in the forefront among the practical intelligences of human history—­once told a friend that when he dwelt upon the rapid progress that mankind was making in politics, morals, and the arts of living, and when he considered that each one improvement always begets another, he felt assured that the future progress of the race was likely to be quicker than it had ever been.  He was never wearied of foretelling inventions yet to come, and he wished he could revisit the earth at the end of a century to see how mankind was getting on.  With all my heart I share his wish.  Of all the men who have built up great States, I do believe there is not one whose alacrity of sound sense and single-eyed beneficence of aim could be more safely trusted than Franklin to draw light from the clouds and pierce the economic and political confusions of our time.  We can imagine the amazement and complacency of that shrewd benignant mind if he could watch all the giant marvels of your mills and furnaces, and all the apparatus devised by the wondrous inventive faculties of man; if he could have foreseen that his experiments with the kite in his garden at Philadelphia, his tubes, his Leyden jars would end in the electric appliances of to-day—­the largest electric plant in all the world on the site of Fort Duquesne; if he could have heard of 5,000,000,000 of passengers carried in the United States by electric motor power in a year; if he could have realized all the rest of the magician’s tale of our time.