BRIGHT LAND TO WESTWARD
From "Modern Eloquence," Vol. III, Geo. L. Shuman and Company, Chicago, publishers.
BY E. O. WOLCOTT
Mr. President and Gentlemen,—It was with great diffidence that I accepted the invitation of your President to respond to a toast to- night. I realized my incapacity to do justice to the occasion, while at the same time I recognized the high compliment conveyed. I felt somewhat as the man did respecting the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy; he said he didn't know whether Lord Bacon wrote Shakespeare's works or not, but if he didn't, he missed the greatest opportunity of his life.
We are a plain people, and live far away. We are provincial; we have no distinctive literature and no great poets; our leading personage abroad of late seems to be the Honorable "Buffalo Bill"; and we use our adjectives so recklessly that the polite badinage indulged in toward each other by your New York editors to us seems tame and spiritless. In mental achievement we may not have fully acquired the use of the fork, and are "but in the gristle and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood." We stand toward the East somewhat as country to city cousin; about as New to Old England, only we don't feel half so badly about it, and on the whole are rather pleased with ourselves. There is not in the whole broad West a ranch so lonely or so remote that a public school is not within reach of it. With generous help from the East, Western colleges are elevating and directing Western thought, and men busy making States yet find time to live manly lives and to lend a hand. All this may not be aesthetic, but it is virile, and it leads up and not down.
There are some things more important than the highest culture. The West is the Almighty's reserve ground, and as the world is filling up, He is turning even the old arid plains and deserts into fertile acres, and is sending there the rain as well as the sunshine. A high and glorious destiny awaits us; soon the balance of population will lie the other side of the Mississippi, and the millions that are coming must find waiting for them schools and churches, good government, and a happy people:—
"Who love the land because it is their own,
And scorn to give aught other reason why;
Would shake hands with a King upon his throne,
And think it kindness to his Majesty."
In everything which pertains to progress in the West, the Yankee reėnforcements step rapidly to the front. Every year she needs more of them, and as the country grows the annual demand becomes greater. Genuine New Englanders are to be had on tap only in six small States, and remembering this we feel that we have the right to demand that in the future, even more than in the past, the heads of the New England households weary not in the good work.
In these days of "booms" and New Souths and Great Wests, when everybody up North who fired a gun is made to feel that he ought to apologize for it, and good fellowship everywhere abounds, there is a sort of tendency to fuse; only big and conspicuous things are much considered; and New England being small in area and most of her distinguished people being dead, she is just now somewhat under an eclipse. But in her past she has undying fame. You of New England and her borders live always in the atmosphere of her glories; the scenes which tell of her achievements are ever near at hand, and familiarity and contact may rob them of their charms, and dim to your eyes their sacredness. The sons of New England in the West revisit her as men who make pilgrimage to some holy shrine, and her hills and valleys are still instinct with noble traditions. In her glories and her history we claim a common heritage, and we never wander so far away from her that, with each recurring anniversary of this day, our hearts do not turn to her with renewed love and devotion for our beloved New England; yet—
"Not by Eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But Westward, look, the land is bright!"