Thomas Hylton is the author of "Save Our Land, Save Our Towns," a call to action on land use and growth issues facing Pennsylvania. The following speech by Mr. Hylton reflects on the issues he raised in his 1995 book.

One of my most enjoyable pastimes every year is accompanying my wife's elementary school class on their annual walk to the public library in Pottstown, where we've lived the last 22 years.

As you know, children in first grade learn the most important educational skill there is, which is to read. Once you've learned to read, all the wonders of the universe are at your feet. And just before summer, my wife always walks her whole class to the Pottstown Public Library to get one book. And we hope they go back many times during the summer and get many more books.

After getting our books, we walk to 222 Chestnut Street, which is the Hylton residence. All the kids troop to the back yard where they sit under the shade of our big trees and have popsicles And in small groups, they are escorted into our house to pet our dog, Rugby. And then we all walk back to school.

My wife has been teaching for many years -- long enough to know that if the kids forget everything else about their school year, they'll remember coming to our house and petting our dog.

This educational experience is possible because our town of Pottstown

is a pedestrian community, the kind that nobody's been building in Pennsylvania for the last 60 years. In fact, thanks to modern planning and zoning dogma, it is expressly forbidden by law to build places like Pottstown.

I had the good fortune to live my entire life in Pennsylvania cities and towns.

My birthplace of Wyomissing, a turn of the century borough just outside Reading, had all the elements of society in less than a square mile. My family's modest rowhouse was just three blocks from the mansions of the men who founded Wyomissing. It was just two blocks from the Berkshire Knitting Mills, where my father helped develop the world's first nylon stockings. His office was so close he not only walked to work, he even came home for lunch. Our house was near stores, the park and Wyomissing Elementary School, where I walked to kindergarten all by myself.

My father died at the age of 40, and my family, in reduced financial circumstances, eventually moved to an apartment house in the city of Reading.

Reading in the late 1950s and early 1960s was already declining, but it was still a wonderful place to grow up. I could walk to the 5th & Spring Elementary School and to Northwest Junior High School, where I had a wide range of friends, from the son of a janitor to daughter of a neurosurgeon.

I could walk to all my friends' houses. I frequently walked to the Reading Public Library, my favorite place. I could walk to the downtown department stores. I could walk to choir practice at Christ Church after school.

At least once a week, I'd walk to my grandmother's apartment on North Tenth Street. She was always home and ready to give me lots of love and attention. And I could be useful. I'd run errands for her at the store and usually have 12 cents left over to buy a Tastykake. I had several adult friends of my own, like Martin Luther Coleman, who ran Sally's Luncheonette.

This way of life was inexpensive and fostered a sense of community. Elderly people served as neighborhood watchdogs. Children like me could be independent, but still be observed by adults who knew our parents. Poor and working class people patronized the same schools, stores and public places as the middle class, which helped upward mobility and gave everyone a stake in maintaining public order.

I dwell on all this because, unfortunately, there is a whole generation of Pennsylvanians who have no idea what a wonderful and enriching place a city or town can be, especially for a child. In fact, most suburbanites think cities are terrible places to live.

And the reason they think cities and towns are so awful, even though people have been living there for the last 6,000 years of human history, is because they've witnessed the results of 50 years of senseless public and private policies, which have given every incentive for middle class and affluent people to abandon our cities instead of improving them, and which have legally mandated an ugly, inefficient, environmentally damaging and socially divisive way of life known as suburban sprawl.

In 1948, the year I was born, Philadelphia was a prosperous, stimulating and even fashionable place to live. It had an outstanding public school system. Now whole neighborhoods lie in ruins while the city, abandoned by industry and the middle class, struggles to survive.

Meanwhile, the surrounding countryside, which once boasted some of the most scenic landscapes and fertile fields in America, has been obliterated by sprawling development. In the last 25 years, the four suburban counties of Montgomery, Chester, Delaware and Bucks have lost a nearly a quarter of their farmland, even as the region's total population has declined by 140,000 residents.

Or take Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the richest farming county in America. Lancaster outproduces 13 states, including New Jersey and every state of New England. Its beautiful landscapes and Plain Sect farmers have made it justly famous the world over. During the 1980s, the Lancaster County Planning Commission approved developments covering nearly 70 square miles of their beautiful land for outlets, housing projects and corporate centers. That's an area more than half the size of Philadelphia. Meanwhile, the city of Lancaster has lost thousands of residents, thousands of jobs, to become a catch basin for the poor and minorities.

Throughout Pennsylvania, the story is the same. Virtually every city has seen its population diminish since 1950, usually accompanied by eroding neighborhoods and debilitated buildings.

Pittsburgh has hemorrhaged nearly half its people. Scranton, Chester, Altoona and York have all lost more than a third of their residents.

Even our state capital, Harrisburg, has lost more than 40 percent of its population as people spread out their homes, stores, and offices over five surrounding counties.

States like California and Florida have been transformed since World War 2 by massive population growth. But here in Pennsylvania, we've hardly grown at all ­­ less than 15 percent in 40 years. What we've done is spent billions of dollars in new infrastructure to do little more than take our existing population and spread it around. And we've lost more than four million acres of farmland -- an area larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined -- to do it.

For the last 40 years, in fact, the government has firmly embraced an idiotic planning theory that has destroyed communities and decentralized Pennsylvania into rigidly separated zones connected by a vast network of highways.

Four decades of such building practices have transformed the Pennsylvania landscape into what Penn State professor Peirce Lewis calls "galactic cities" -- masses of housing subdivisions, corporate centers, industrial parks, and shopping malls scattered as randomly as the stars.

This new world has been designed for cars, not people. It is a fundamental fact that a person takes up 2 square feet of space, but a car takes up 60 to 90 square feet of space. Everywhere we go, we must take our 3,500-pound cars with us, so our all our stores, schools, houses, offices -- even our parks -- must set aside massive amounts of storage space for cars. For every car registered in Pennsylvania, it's been estimated, we have six or seven parking spaces.

Where once we had vibrant downtowns, we now have Wal-Marts and Kmarts and shopping malls -- insipid blocks of buildings surrounded by huge expanses of treeless blacktop, which in turn are surrounded by ugly, multi­lane highways.

We've made it almost impossible to walk anywhere. In the greater Pottstown area we have 10 school districts. In only one district ­­ Pottstown ­­ are substantial numbers of students actually able to walk to school. Everyone else takes a bus.

If you are too young to drive a car ­­ or too old to drive a car ­­ you are completely reliant on someone else to get where you want to go. Kids can't do anything with an adult chauffeuring them around, and our elderly live in terror of losing their driver's license, because once that happens they cease to be an independent member of society.

And that is one of the greatest tragedies of sprawl. In Pennsylvania, we have thousands of children who desperately need the love and affection and attention of a responsible adult. We have thousands of elderly people whose lives would be immensely enriched if they could give love and attention to those children on a daily basis. But thanks to our development patterns, they never get to enjoy the kind of relationship I had with my grandmother.

Anyone who owns Monopoly knows the name Pennsylvania was once world famous for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Because of our sprawling development patterns, we've largely forsaken the railroad, which remains the most energy­efficient system of overland transportation known to man.

For each gallon of fuel, a train can move a ton of freight three times as far as a truck can, and with far less air pollution.

On one track no wider than a residential alley, a railroad can haul 50,000 passengers in an hour. To do the same by highway requires 10,000 cars traveling over four lanes of highway, each of which contains a driver and four passengers. And once those cars arrive at their destination, it takes an area equivalent to 69 football fields to store them.

Railroads are so environmentally superior that the Swiss people recently voted to forbid the construction of any new major highways, and to require that by the year 2004 all heavy trucks passing through Switzerland must be put on railroad flatbeds.

At the end of World War II, the United States had the most intricate and sophisticated rail network in the world. We proceeded to throw it away. During the last 30 years, as we've spent billions of dollars to pave over the countryside for new highway construction, we've abandoned about 6,000 miles of rail lines in Pennsylvania.

Suburban sprawl is not only unattractive and inefficient, it is also very costly to build. Each new mile of electric and telephone line, water and sewer pipe, and road serves fewer people than ever before ­­ and it's all subsidized at enormous expense to the taxpayer.

Nor is suburbia as safe as we'd like to think. The New York Times did a study of mortality statistics and found that a young person growing up in suburban Bergen County, New Jersey, one of the wealthiest counties in America, is three times more likely to die before the age of 24 than a person growing up in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. The reason? Car accidents, which are far and away the leading cause of death and serious injury for young people in Pennsylvania.

But the greatest hazard of sprawl is its impact on the environment.

Global warming is not some fantasy dreamed up by environmental extremists. Eminent scientists all over the world, including more than 100 Nobel laureates, have warned us that it can have catastrophic results for the human race. The earth has warmed about 1 degree in the past century, most of that coming in the last 30 years. The 1980s was the warmest decade on record. Scientists expect the earth to warm another 3 to 8 degrees in the next century, depending on how much we can control on greenhouse gas emissions. This could lead to extreme variations in the weather, the parching of agricultural areas and massive coastal flooding where tens of millions of people live.

More than 150 nations signed a treaty in 1992 to stabilize greenhouse gase emissions at 1990 levels by the year 2000, and virtually none of these countries, including the United States, is going to reach that goal.

In the United States, we produce more greenhouse gas emissions ­­ 21 tons annually per person ­­ than any other country on earth. And they've gone up 5 percent in the last five years.

We use twice as much gas, per capita, as the Germans. We use nearly three times as much energy as the Japanese or the French.

But developing nations are the big problem. Right now, we Pennsylvanians use 300 million BTUs of energy annually per person, while the Chinese use just 26 million.

The Chinese have about five times as many people as we do, living on a land area just slightly larger than the United States. The Chinese have about 20% of the world's population, but just 7% of its arable land.

Despite stringent birth control policies, China is growing by the equivalent population of Pennsylvania each year. It is experiencing tremendous industrial growth. The Chinese aim to make car production one of the pillars of their industry. Car production in China grew 20 percent last year, and they hope to build 3 million cars per year by the end of this decade. Development is sprawling out into their countryside, where it has removed nearly 20 percent of their farmland since the late 1950s.

The environmental impact of millions of Chinese driving around in cars will be catastrophic, both in terms of the loss of agricultural lands the Chinese need to feed their people, and the pollution that could destroy the environment as we know it.

We might well ask, how can they be so irresponsible?

It's because they want to be just like us.

We in America cannot continue to maintain extravagantly wasteful lifestyles while expecting developing countries to restrain their appetites and conserve their resources.

Suburban sprawl is a primary factor in economic and racial segregation. As we know, poor and minorities mostly live in the towns and cities, while the whites and affluent mostly live in the suburbs.

Three of every four black babies born in Pennsylvania are born in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Chester, or Harrisburg. Three of every four Hispanic babies are born in Philadelphia, Reading, Allentown, Bethlehem, Lancaster, or Harrisburg.

In metropolitan Philadelphia, 85 percent of the affluent live in the suburbs while 80 percent of the poor live in the city.

In Pennsylvania, and throughout America, our minority population is growing much faster than whites, yet the whites are still trying to run away.

All this is not only morally wrong, it's extremely harmnful to the future of this commonwealth.

If we look at Bosnia, Rwanda, Lebanon, India - dozens of countries with chronic hatred and conflict and division because groups of people never learned to live with one another.

Three years before the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln warned that "a house divided against itself cannot stand." Pennsylvania is a state that isolates two-thirds of its poor people in its cities and towns, while the middle class and affluent live and work in the suburbs; it is a state that isolates more than two-thirds of its black children in segregated city schools, while suburban schools are virtually all-white; it is a state that even allows the construction of affluent housing subdivisions closed to public access and protected from the rest of us by guardhouses and gates. Is Pennsylvania truly a commonwealth, or has it become a house divided against itself?

We have a $5 trillion national debt, an emerging global economy in which there will be few jobs for unskilled workers, and a social security and medicare system that left unchanged threatens to bankrupt the government. Nationally, we have only three workers for every retired person, going down to two workers by the year 2030. In Pennsylvania, we have the second highest percentage of elderly in America.

We have five times as many inmates in Pennsylvania prisons as we did 25 years ago, at a annual cost of $20,000 each, but we're not one bit safer.

There are more than two hundred thousand kids in the Philadelphia public school system. There are another 100,000 kids in the Pittsburgh, Erie, Harrisburg, York, Lancaster, and Allentown school districts.

These kids are either going to grow up to be an asset to themselves and society or a liability. Right now, huge numbers of these young people don't even come close to having the attitudes and skills they'll need for productive lives.

I'm all in favor of investing more money in our city schools to help these kids but I'm skeptical that as long as we have huge concentrations of poor children in any given school or neighborhood that we'll see great progress.

My wife has been a teacher for 23 years in the Pottstown School District, which is about 33 percent low­income and minority. For many years she taught in a school next to public housing project. Every fall, she had kids who ­­ at the age of 10 years old ­­ were already full of bitterness and a sense of worthlessness and very little conception of right and wrong. And every year, she witnessed the phenomenon of critical mass. If kids with decent homelifes and morals were in the majority, they would carry the rest of the class with them. She would have order and peace and a productive year. If she had too many troubled children, the year would be a disaster.

Considerable research has shown that tracking ­­ grouping students by ability ­­ provides marginal benefits for perhaps the top 5 percent of our students, but stunts the learning process for everyone else. The vast majority of American children perform best when placed in classes of mixed abilities and backgrounds.

Likewise, segregating communities by race and income shortchanges our children and does incalculable harm to our long­term national interest.

In Pennsylvania one in six children lives in poverty, concentrated in our cities and most rural counties. Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Erie, Harrisburg, Lancaster, York, Reading, Allentown -- in all these districts, more than half the children are low income. If we want these children to succeed in sizeable numbers, we must have racially and economically integrated schools and communities.

We must apply the idea of critical mass ­­ integrating minorities and the poor into the mainstream of America ­­ to foster community, to promote traditional values, and to help all our children to succeed. There is no other way.

Over a period of time, this can be done. Montgomery County, Maryland, which is Maryland's wealthiest county, has required since 1974 that every development of more than 50 units must set aside 15 percent of those homes for low­and moderate­income people. This has led to developments like Avenel, which has modest homes for the working poor in the midst of million dollar mansions.

The rule has helped integrate the poor among the middle class, and helped to double Montgomery County's minority population in the last 20 years, to 12 percent black, 7 percent Hispanic and 8 percent Asian.

Unfortunately, there are many people in Pennsylvania who think their financial status gives them a right to isolate themselves from the poor and their troubles. But in a democracy, everyone has an equal responsibility to share common problems and help solve them. This year, we are commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Allied victory in World War II. In World War II, no American avoided fighting or dying or risking the loss of loved ones because of their status or wealth. Everyone shared.

We hear a lot of talk about property rights. The fact is, all property rights are dependent on the community. We can maintain a right to our land only because we can record a deed at the county courthouse, which is supported by our community. We enforce our property right through a legal system supported by our community. Our property would be worthless without roads and electric and telephone lines built by our community. We are safe and secure in our homes because of a police department supported by our community.

So just as our community makes it possible for us to enjoy our property, we have an equal responsibility to support healthy communities throughout Pennsylvania. The only reason we enjoy our free civilization is because of the hard effort of thousands of men and women who went before us to build it. And the only way we can repay them is to help make a better world for those who come after us.

In 1993, I studied state planning. Eleven states have adopted comprehensive plans, most of which are still in their early stages.

Statewide planning is a simple concept. It often starts by asking people, what kind of society do we want to shape for ourselves and our children over the next generation? And once we've decided that, let's write it down and establish a plan with some basic strategies to reach our goals. And then let's require every state agency -- from the Department of Transportation to the Department of Agriculture -- to follow the plan. Let's require every local government, from school districts to townships to sewer authorities, to follow the plan.

And citizens' task forces, from Vermont to Washington, reached remarkably similar conclusions about what they want:

* They want economic development to provide a steady source

of good jobs.

* They want to make their cities and towns safe and attractive places to live.

* They want to protect their farmland and open spaces.

* They want housing everyone can afford.

* They want good government services at the least cost.

* They want to foster a sense of community.

Now these ideals may seem obvious. But only a handful of states

have actually defined them as goals and established a plan to carry them out. And most of these states, after considerable research and public discussion, have reached similar conclusions about they need. They need to build communities, not sprawl.

A real community, by my definition, is a place where at least some people live near where they work, and where all children can walk to school. A real community has a mixture of people of all ages and all incomes. It has a mixture of white people and whatever minorities and immigrants live in the region. A real community is built to a human scale, with a full range of housing types, placed close enough together so residents can walk if they want to and enjoy informal meetings and greetings on the street. A real community inculcates in its children, from a very young age, that they have a responsibility to care for each other, and that being a good citizen requires more than just voting and paying taxes. It requires getting personally involved in some worthwhile community endeavor. A real community has lots of trees and greenery and well-maintained buildings, because beauty and order is vital to our well-being.

I believe that virtually every problem we have in Pennsylvania -- crime, chronic poverty, the degradation of our cities, the loss of farmland and forests, pollution, the high cost of living - could be greatly alleviated by building real communities.

In 1992, New Jersey passed the state's first comprehensive plan - one that will encourage every agency of the state to channel its resources to rebuild New Jersey's cities and older suburbs along the lines of traditional communities and to discourage suburban sprawl.

New Jersey's state plan has identified more than 600 centers, ranging from the cities like Trenton to crossroad villages with a dozen houses and a mini-mart ,where traditional town-like development will be encouraged. The state requires every municipality to actively plan for its fair share of affordable housing. For example, Moorestown, one of the wealthiest townships in the state, has adopted a plan to place its required 500 units of low-income housing in various sections of the municipality, most of them in small apartment houses designed to look like single-family homes.

Before adopting this state plan, the New Jersey Legislature required an independent assessment of its likely impact. A year­long study directed by Rutgers University concluded that implementing the plan would save the government $1.3 billion in infrastructure costs over a 20­year period and another $400 million annually in operating costs.

That's just the government. That's not talking about the millions of dollars residents will save by not having to drive everywhere for everything.

Several states, such as Oregon and Washington, have

adopted formal urban growth boundaries. For example, each of Oregon's 242 cities (and in Oregon terminology, the smallest Pennsylvania borough would be called a city) has drawn up a growth boundary to accommodate all forseeable growth for the next 20 years. Development is given the red carpet treatment inside the boundaries, and except for agriculture and forestry, virtually forbidden outside of them.

Metropolitan Portland, which contains 24 cities and parts of three counties in its growth boundary, requires all its municipalities to zone housing at an average density of 6 to 10 units per acre.

And people can live nicely at those densities. For example, I know a successful Pennsylvania lawyer, with a record of outstanding service to his community, who with his wife brought up eight children, all while living in a modest house on a 7th of an acre lot on a tree-lined street of a Pennsylvania city. His name? Bob Casey, until recently the governor of Pennsylvania.

Although Oregon is twice the size of Pennsylvania in land area, and has just a fourth as many residents, Oregon still believes people are better off living in towns. "We like the outdoors," one Portland city councilman told me, "but we don't feel we have to live there. There's an ethic that says it's better if we all own the outdoors and take care of it collectively."

Very few people have any idea how compact a quality environment can be. For example, consider one of the fastest growing townships in Pennsylvania -- Cranberry Township in Butler County, just north of Pittsburgh. Cranberry has about 18,000 residents sprawled over all 21 square miles of its territory, marring the scenery and forcing everybody to drive everywhere for everything. Let's suppose we were to rearrange Cranberry's population into just two villages.We put 6,000 people into one village of just 1.4 square miles. Let's call it Swarthmore. We put the other 12,000 people into another village of 1.8 square miles. We'll call it Princeton. Now everyone in Cranberry is living on about 15 percent of its land area, so 85 percent is left over as open space. In these two villages, the residents are close enough so they can walk to many of the places they need to go. In fact, 6,000 people are enough to support a public school system, so each of these villages can have its own schools.

There's even room in each village for higher education: Swarthmore College, and Princeton University. And because we have a sizable group of people living in a small area, they can support a rail line. So we can connect these two villages with a passenger train line that goes to Philadelphia and points beyond.

Of course, I'm talking about real places. The combined population of Princeton, New Jersey, and Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, is equal to Cranberry, but their combined land area, even including the colleges, is just 15 percent of Cranberry.

Princeton and Swarthmore are among many attractive towns ­­ like Alexandria, Beacon Hill, Georgetown, Charlestown, S.C., Coral Gables, Fla., -- that are built at densities that support walking and public transportation.

If jwe could convince our middle class residents in Pennsylvania to live at the same densities as places like Princeton and Swarthmore, we could accommodate all the population growth we're going to have in Pennsylvania for decades to come without using up one acre of farmland and open space.

To my mind, Oak Park, Illinois, just outside Chicago, is an ideal community.

The turn of the century home of Frank Lloyd Wright and Ernest Hemingway, Oak Park has stores, offices, and homes within easy walking distance. It has two historic districts. It has every kind of housing, ranging from apartments in three­story brick buildings to small houses on small lots to a couple of mansions on one­acre lots.

It has a thriving commercial street with all kinds of stores, including a 4­in­1 movie theater. It has two rapid transit lines going into Chicago. It has a dozen parks, a score of tennis courts, two Olympic­sized pools, and three libraries.

Twenty percent of Oak Park's residents are black; 25 percent have low or moderate incomes.

Yet Oak Park has one of the finest school systems in Illinois. There is no trash in the streets, no graffiti, no run­down buildings.

But the most beautiful aspect of Oak Park is its magnificent street trees. When Oak Park was developed in the early 1900s, 8­foot­wide tree lawns were placed between the curbs and sidewalks of every street. About 20,000 street trees were planted that have been carefully maintained ever since. So wherever you go you are under a canopy of green. And in the spring and summer, flowers are everywhere.

My wife and I know that racially and economically integrated communities can work, because we live in one.

Our house is in a low­ and moderate­income neighborhood, but it's a pleasant neighborhood because of the critical mass factor. We have a predominate number of people who take good care of their properties and they set the tone for everyone else.

We love waking up in the morning to the chimes of the Trinity Church carillon. We like to hear the banter of the volunteers lounging outside the nearby firehouse. We like saying hello to the hygienists going to the dentist's office down the block.

On a warm fall day, we can smell the pumpkins baking at the Mrs. Smith's Pie Plant four blocks toward the river.

For all the 22 years I worked for The Mercury newspaper, it took me just two minutes to walk to my office from the back door of my house. Now I work out of my house. My wife can walk to her school in 15 minutes.

By not having to commute a half­hour to work every day, my wife and I have saved ourselves more than 10,000 hours behind the wheel during the last 24 years ­­ the equivalent of five years at work. And we've saved about $85,000 in transportation costs. We have a car, and we like our car, but it's our servant, not our master.

My house is on a tenth of an acre lot. I have a little spot next to the house for our car, and a yard that's private and big enough for our dog and family gatherings, with mature trees and shrubbery ­­birds, squirrels, even a possum or two.

I look forward to the day when more people discover how pleasant it is to live in Pottstown and other towns where you can enjoy real interaction with your neighbors instead of being isolated in a car everywhere you go.

I look forward to the revival of Philadelphia and our other cities as attractive and even fashionable places to live ­­ the focus of our pride instead of a place to be shunned.

I am encouraged by Lancaster County, which is moving ahead with a comprehensive plan similar to the state plans I have outlined. Lancaster is working with its 60 municipalities to create 13 urban growth boundaries: a large one around the city of Lancaster, and 12 smaller ones around boroughs like Lititz and Ephrata. Walkable, livable communities will be encouraged within the boundaries. Development will be strongly discouraged outside of them.

Of all the 50 states and the nations of the world, we in Pennsylvania have a unique heritage. Pennsylvania is a testament to the tremendous power of idealism.

In an age that was just as selfish and cynical as our own, William Penn actually believed it was possible for people of all races and classes and religions to live in peace and harmony and govern themselves according to the precepts of Jesus.

And while he fell short of that lofty goal, he did establish the most enlightened government of his day, anywhere in the world. His 1682 Frame of Government was a major influence 100 years later when Jefferson and Madison and Hamilton came to Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, to create modern democracy.

American democracy was expanded to include everyone by another great Pennsylvanian, Thaddeus Stevens. Thaddeus Stevens was known as a Radical in his day, because he had this radical idea that all Americans, rich and poor, black and white, should have equal opportunities and equal protections under the law.

In 1835, when Pennsylvania legislators were about to abolish the free public school system they had just established the year before, Thaddeus Stevens singlehandedly faced them down with a magnificent speech in the state House of Representatives. He said that public schools were the foundation of democracy, where "all were placed on perfect equality, the rich and the poor man's son, for all were deemed children of the same common parent -- the Commonwealth."

Thaddeus Stephens attacked slavery when it wasn't a very popular thing to do, even in Pennsylvania. Later, as the most influential member of Congress during the Civil War, he pressured Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. And after the war, he brought about three great Constitutional amendments -- the 13th, 14th, and 15th, which abolished slavery and gave all citizens equal rights and protections under the law.

Thaddeus Stevens died in 1868, and blacks and others were soon denied the fair chance they had been promised.

For more than 80 years after his death, the most important part of the 14th amendment, which guarantees all citizens equal protections under the law, was ignored ... by the states, by the Congress, and by the Supreme Court.

But in 1952, Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to take another look at the 14th amendment. Two years later, the court unanimously ruled that separate schools for whites and blacks were inherently unequal, violating the 14th amendment, and the modern civil rights movement was born.

Thaddeus Stevens thought a lot about the future. He cared about doing what was right. He felt a powerful obligation to make a better world for future generations. And he did.

We all have the ability to change things for the better ... we can save our land and save our towns ... we can make all our communities, safe, attractive, and environmentally responsible ... if we commit ourselves and have faith. What we need is a handful of people in each community like you -- people of good will, and willing to get involved. The elite group Teddy Roosevelt called "the fellowship of the doers."

I leave you with this thought by W. H. Murray: "Until you are committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative, there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment you definitely commit yourself, then Providence moves too.

All sorts of things occur to help you that would never otherwise have occurred.

A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in your favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.

I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets:

"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.

Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it."

Mr. Hilton can be contacted by writing 222 Chestnut Street, Pottstown, Pennsylvania 19464 or by phoning 610 323-6837.

Reprinted with the permission of the author.

For more information on environmental protection programs visit the Department of Environmental Protection website at: http://www.dep.state.pa.us.

January 28, 1997