You turn from this strange nightmare scene and seek the solace of the great cathedral that you saw from afar towering over these battlements like the Matterhorn. The nearer view does not disappoint you. Slender and beautifully proportioned, it rises in great leaps to a pinnacle nearly twice as high as the cross of St Paul's Cathedral. It is the temple of St Woolworth. Into this masterpiece he poured the wealth acquired in his sixpenny bazaars, and there it stands, the most significant building in America and the first turret to catch the noose of light that the dawn flings daily over the Atlantic from the East. You enter its marble halls and take an express train to the forty-ninth floor, flashing in your journey past visions of crowded offices, tier after tier, offices of banks and publishers and merchants and jewellers, like a great street, Piccadilly or the Strand, that has been miraculously turned skywards by some violent geological “fault.” And at the forty-ninth floor you get out and take another “local” train to the top, and from thence you look giddily down, far down even upon the great precipices of the Grand Canon, down to the streets where the moving throng you left a few minutes ago looks like a colony of ants or black-beetles wandering uncertainly over the pavement.
And in the midst of the great fortresses of commerce, two toy buildings with tiny spires. You have been in them, perhaps, and know them to be large churches, St Paul's and Trinity, curiously like our own City churches. Once New York nestled under their shadows; now they are swallowed up and lost at the base of the terrific structures that loom above them. In one of them you will have seen the pew of George Washington still decorated with the flag of the thirteen stars of the original union. Perhaps you will be tempted to see in this inverted world an inverted civilisation. There will flash on your mind's eye the vision of the great dome that seems to float in the heavens over the secular activities of another city, still holding aloft, to however negligent and indifferent a generation, the symbol of the supremacy of spiritual things. And you will wonder whether in this astonishing spectacle below you, in which the temples of the ancient worship crouch at the porch of these Leviathan temples of commerce, there is the unconscious expression of another philosophy of life in which St Woolworth and not St Paul points the way to the stars.
And for the correction to this disquieting thought you turn from the scene below to the scene around. There in front lies the harbour, so near that you feel you could cast a stone into it. And beyond, the open Atlantic, with all its suggestions of the tide of humanity, a million a year, that has flowed, with its babel of tongues and its burden of hopes, past the statue with the torch that stands in the midst of the harbour, to be swallowed up in the vastness of the great continent that lies behind you. You turn and look over the enormous city that, caught in the arms of its two noble rivers, extends over many a mile before you, with its overflow of Brooklyn on the far bank of one stream, and its overflow of Jersey City on the far bank of the other. In the brilliant sunshine and the clear, smokeless atmosphere the eye travels far over this incredible vista of human activity. And beyond the vision of the eye, the mind carries the thought onward to the great lakes and the seething cities by their shores, and over the illimitable plains westward to sunny lands more remote than Europe, but still obedient to the stars and stripes, and southward by the great rivers to the tropic sea.
And, as you stand on this giddy pinnacle, looking over New York to the far horizons, you find your mind charged with enormous questionings. They will not be diminished when, after long jouneyings towards those horizons, after days and nights of crowded experiences in many fields of activity, you return to take a farewell glimpse of America. On the contrary, they will be intensified. They will be penetrated by a sense of power unlike anything else the world has to offer—the power of immeasurable resources, still only in the infancy of their development, of inexhaustible national wealth, of a dynamic energy that numbs the mind, of a people infinitely diverse, yet curiously one—one in a certain fierce youthfulness of outlook, as of a people in the confident prime of their morning and with all the tasks and possibilities of the day before them. In the presence of this tumultuous life, with its crudeness and freshness and violence, one looks back to Europe as to something avuncular and elderly, a mellowed figure of the late afternoon, a little tired and more than a little disillusioned and battered by the journey. For him the light has left the morning hills, but here it still clothes those hills with hope and spurs on to adventure.
That strong man who meets you on the brink of Manhattan Rock and tosses his towers to the skies is no idle boaster. He has, in his own phrase, “the goods.” He holds the world in fee. What he intends to do with his power is not very clear, even to himself. He started out, under the inspiration of a great prophet, to rescue Europe and the world from the tyranny of militarism, but the infamies of European statesmanship and the squalid animosities of his own household have combined to chill the chivalrous purpose. In his perplexity he has fallen a victim to reaction at home. He is filled with panic. He sees Bolshevism behind every bush, and a revolutionist in everyone who does not keep in step. Americanism has shrunk from a creed of world deliverance to a creed of American interests, and the “100 per cent. American” in every disguise of designing self-advertisement is preaching a holy war against everything that is significant and inspiring in the story of America. It is not a moment when the statue of Liberty, on her pedestal out there in the harbour, can feel very happy. Her occupation has gone. Her torch is no longer lit to invite the oppressed and the adventurer from afar. On the contrary, she turns her back on America and warns the alien away. Her torch has become a policeman's baton.
And as, in the afternoon of another day, brilliant, and crisp with the breath of winter, you thread your way once more through the populous waters of the noble harbour and make for the open sea, you look back upon the receding shore and the range of mighty battlements. The sun floods the land you are leaving with light. At this gateway he is near his setting, but at the far gateway of the Pacific he is still in his morning prime, so vast is the realm he traverses. The mountain range of your first impression is caught in the glow of evening, and the proud pinnacle that looked to the untutored eye like the Matterhorn or the temple of primeval gods points its delicate traceries to the skies. And as you gaze you are conscious of a great note of interrogation taking shape in the mind. Is that Cathedral of St Woolworth the authentic expression of the soul of America, or has this mighty power you are leaving another gospel for mankind? And as the light fades and battlements and pinnacle merge into the encompassing dark there sounds in the mind the echoes of an immortal voice—“Let us here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth!”
And with that resounding music echoing in the mind you bid farewell to America, confident that, whatever its failures, the great spirit of Lincoln will outlive and outsoar the pinnacle of St Woolworth.
