image and headline taken from Toronto Star article. Click either image to visit the Star story.
Excerpt below, Full article here
“Among the gigantic labours of this engineering age, we have already recorded the spanning of the Menai Straits, the undermining of the Thames, the crossing of Folkestone Valley, the tunneling of the Shakespeare Cliff, and the bridging of the Wye; to which colossal labours we have now to add the commencement of the construction of a viaduct, a magnitude worthy to be associated with the above triumphs of engineering skill.”
Consider now a report on the building of an iron clock-tower in the faraway town of Geelong — hailed as “the Liverpool of Australia.”
A correspondent to whom the limitations of 140 characters were unknown boasted that “we build leviathan ships and mansion-like houses of iron; and, in the instance before us, we have the ready adaptation of this material to the immediate wants of a rapidly rising community, whose want of public building is no sooner known in the mother country, than it is provided.”
It is at this point that we return from the 19th Century to the 21st.
Given the laudable example of our industrious forebears, how is it that modern-day Toronto can’t seem to get its act together to build a transit system worthy of the name?
How is it that decay, rather than progress seems to be the recurring theme of the day?
How is it that, increasingly, we manufacture little (save for a bull market in store greeters) and fix almost nothing?
How is it that a younger generation all but excluded from participation in the economy placidly accepts its exile to intern nation and parental basements?
This week, the president of the United States of America gave a speech striking for how diametrically opposed it was in tone from the upbeat ethos of the Illustrated News of London circa 1863, and how much it echoes the discouraging lament of the times.
By: Jim Coyle News, Published on Sat Jul 27 2013
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