Viewing page 34 of 44

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

- 14 - 

And yet, Washington has many advantages in so far as its future development is concerned. Its life centers around the Government, as those who planned the city intended it should do. There is no manufacturing; and the engineering and industrial problems, which have to be met at such expense and effort in great industrial centers like Pittsburgh and Chicago, are entirely absent. Washington is still a city of moderate size, notwithstanding the fact that its population has grown from seventy-five thousand at the time of the Civil War to about a half a million today. But so long as it remains chiefly a seat of Government, it will retain its unique character among the cities of the country. More and more it will be visited by people who will go to Washington because of its beauty and their feeling of pride and personal ownership in the nation's Capital. With the rapid growth in the use of automobiles and of aeroplanes, larger and larger numbers will visit Washington each year. As it becomes more beautiful and its fame grows, people will visit it from all parts of the world and Washington will find, as Paris has done, that architectural and landscape beauty can be a source of profit, as well as pride and satisfaction, to a city. 

But there are weightier reasons than that why we should give out support to the effort to rebuild our national capital. Until recently, America has been in the frontier stage as nations go. We were too busy about the hard realities of existence to have much time for the amenities. But now we have the opportunity and we have also the resources to raise the standard of taste in this country; and the extent to which this is being done has no parallel at present in any country in the world. No where are the arts of architecture and landscape engineering being practiced more extensively and successfully than in America.