Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/557

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

APPENDIX

by them should be paid into the treasury for the use of the commonwealth.

Everthing possible ought to be done to encourage the creation of a single municipality which shall include all of the extensive population at the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, now under the authority of several different municipal governments. Such a course would result in a saving of expense, an improvement in official tone, with increase of responsibility, and an advancement in prestige and influence. Not only the people of the locality, but those of the whole commonwealth are interested, and they should be aided by all necessary legislation. At the other end of the state, the great industrial interests and the vast population along the Delaware at Philadelphia, Chester and other places are in a sense hide-bound. The way to the sea has been, to a considerable extent, closed to trade, because of distance and imperfect channels. Few natural obstacles are so great that energy will not overcome them. By opening the Erie Canal, De Witt Clinton brought the trade of the lake region to New York harbor and enabled the city there to become the chief port of the country. Philadelphia in the days of our fathers sought to regain her lost supremacy by building a railroad across the mountains, of which she should be the eastern terminus and whose directors should be all “citizens and residents of this commonwealth.” Failure should only be a stimulus to greater exertions. The engineering feats of the people of Manchester, Glasgow and Holland can be repeated in America. All the great power and influence of the commonwealth and her representatives in national affairs, financial and political, should be exerted to secure the deepening of the channel of the Delaware and if need be in addition to dig a ship canal across New Jersey direct to the ocean.

It is high time that attention be given to the preservation of our streams, gifts of God to humanity, which are essential to happiness and comfort and even to life. In western Asia are vast lands where once were teeming civilizations now barren wastes, because the people did not understand how to take care of their water supplies. Our streams are losing both beauty and utility, and are being encroached upon by filling along their banks and using them as dumps for the refuse and pollution which come from mills, factories and habitations. They are also being seized upon by those who hope to make them commercially profitable, and in some instances the waters are being diverted from their

channels. There was a time in the history of the world when a man
537