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THE PARKWAY AND BILLY


THE PARKWAY, HENRY FORD AND BILLY THE BEAN MAN

I walked down the Parkway yesterday morning visualizing that splendid emptiness of sunshine as it will appear five or ten years hence, lined with art galleries, museums and libraries, shaded with growing trees, leading from the majestic pinnacle of the City Hall to the finest public estate in America. It is a long way from those open fields of splintered brick and gravel pits, where workmen are now warming their hands over bonfires, to the Peace Conference in Paris. But the hope occurred to me that the League of Nations will not tie itself down too closely to the spot where its archives are kept. It will be a fine thing if the annual meetings of the League can be held in different cities all over the world, visiting the nations in turn. This process would do much to educate public sentiment to the reality and importance of our new international commission. And in the course of time it is to be supposed that the league might meet in Philadelphia, where, in a sense, it was founded. The world is rich in lovely cities—Rio, Athens, Edinburgh, Rome, Tokio and the rest. But the Philadelphia of the future, as some citizens have dreamed it, will be able to hold up its head with the greatest. I like to think of a Philadelphia in which the lower Schuylkill would