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Show LET AMERICANS SEE AMERICA. h i- More Americans "have booked pas sage for Europe than ever before ir f steamship history. No fewer than 5.00C f will sail during June and July from s Philadelphia nJono, whose expenditures t lor tho summer aside from the pur 2 chase of luxuries, will amount to not 1 less than $1,600,000. 2 They know their Versailles, these tourists of ours, and their Regent Park i and their PotBdam But they cannot tell their foreign friends of the petty 3 artificiality of all such toys. Becauso - 'they have never blessed their eyes ; with the grandiose beauty of tho Yel-; Yel-; lowstone and the Yosemlto. They send post cards homo picturing Mont Blanc and the Jungfrau. But how many have seen dawn or the moonlight moon-light on the Rockies from Colorado Springs or Denver or Butte? They dream of the Riviera. And In their Ignorance they overpraise Bo- cause they do not know that aside from thq exquisite, attractive gambling hell of Monaco, America lias In Florida and Southern California two Rlvieras which far surpass in beauty the "Golden "Gold-en Coast." These tourists talk much of the transit from Switzerland to Italy by the tunnel of the St. Gothnrd. But they know nothing of the departure from Great fSalt Lake a world's wonder won-der In Itself the climb in tho dawn through forty miles of snowsheds to the crest of the Sierra, and the downward down-ward leap of tho train from the deep midsummer snow through seven climates cli-mates in seven hours to the tropic richness of the Sacramento valley and the salt breeziness of San Francisco. They think themselves cosmopolitan, these "globe trotters" of ours. They know Havre and Plymouth and Queonstown and Bremen. But they never have seen Puget Sound, where all the world's navies could lie in landlocked land-locked harbor. As long as even Australians and Africans Af-ricans visit America to see Niagara and the Mammoth cave and the other features of our wonderland that we have mentioned casually, there Is provocation prov-ocation enough In all conscience for the pleading with our pleasure-seeking countrymen who spend $400,000,000 annually an-nually in Europe to study America and Americanism first. There are graver reasons why the knowledge and appreciation of our motherland should preface or at least supplement appreciation of what is good in alien lands. But on the score of enjoyment and economy alone we think the argument Is sufficient to look at homo before we look around. oo |
