Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia / being a concordance of choice tributes to the great Genoese, his grand discovery, and his greatness of mind and purpose

by Unknown

THE ADMIRATION OF A CAREFUL CRITIC.

Henry Harrisse, a celebrated Columbian critic, in his erudite and valuable work, "Columbus and the Bank of St. George."

Nor must you believe that I am inclined to lessen the merits of the great Genoese or fail to admire him. But my admiration is the result of reflection, and not a blind hero-worship. Columbus removed out of the range of mere speculation the idea that beyond the Atlantic Ocean lands existed and could be reached by sea, made of the notion a fixed fact, and linked forever the two worlds. That event, which is unquestionably the greatest of modern times, secures to Columbus a place in the pantheon dedicated to the worthies whose courageous deeds mankind will always admire.

PORTRAIT OF COLUMBUS, BY SIR ANTONIO MORO.
Used by Washington Irving to illustrate his "Life of Columbus." From the original in the possession of Mr. C. F. Gunther of Chicago.
(See pages [52] and [113] .)

But our gratitude must not carry us beyond the limits of an equitable appreciation. Indiscriminate praise works mischief and injustice. When tender souls represent Columbus as being constantly the laughing-stock of all, and leading a life of misery and abandonment in Spain, they do injustice to Deza, to Cabrera, to Quintanilla, to Mendoza, to Beatrice de Bobadilla, to Medina-Celi, to Ferdinand and Isabella, and probably a host of others who upheld him as much as they could from the start. When blind admirers imagine that the belief in the existence of transatlantic countries rushed out of Columbus' cogitations, complete, unaided, and alone, just as Minerva sprang in full armor from the head of Jupiter, they disregard the efforts of numerous thinkers who, from Aristotle and Roger Bacon to Toscanelli, evolved and matured the thought, until Columbus came to realize it. When dramatists, poets, and romancers expatiate upon the supposed spontaneous or independent character of the discovery of America, and ascribe the achievement exclusively to the genius of a single man, they adopt a theory which is discouraging and untrue.

No man is, or ever was, ahead of his times. No human efforts are, or ever were, disconnected from a long chain of previous exertions; and this applies to all the walks of life. When a great event occurs, in science as in history, the hero who seems to have caused it is only the embodiment and resulting force of the meditations, trials, and endeavors of numberless generations of fellow-workers, conscious and unconscious, known and unknown.

When this solemn truth shall have been duly instilled into the minds of men, we will no longer see them live in the constant expectation of Messiahs and providential beings destined to accomplish, as by a sort of miracle, the infinite and irresistible work of civilization. They will rely exclusively upon the concentrated efforts of the whole race, and cherish the encouraging thought that, however imperceptible and insignificant their individual contributions may seem to be, these form a part of the whole, and finally redound to the happiness and progress of mankind.