After a brief hour’s delay our floating palace, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, gets under way. The receding rim of the harbor is filled with people still waving their farewells, and the travelers on the decks are also waving in response. At the same time the ship’s orchestra has begun to play again. It is a melancholy moment, although the soul is raised on high with expectation as we sail out over the broad ocean into another portion of the world, into the land of unlimited possibilities, and away from the old home, perhaps never to be seen again. What thoughts fill the emigrant’s soul? Experienced globe-trotters, who cross the great pond every year, may be as calm and cool at this moment as we are when we hear the signal for the starting of the train from Mödling Station to Vienna; but [I], who was making my first trip across the Atlantic, experienced something of the solemnity of a parting mood, although I left nothing behind save an urn of ashes!
It was a beautiful, smooth passage, with only two or three hours of pitching and discomfort during the whole voyage, which was free from fog and storm. We had a very agreeable captain,—I had the privilege of sitting at his right hand at dinner,—and also very interesting traveling companions. Ah! and this beneficial state of emancipation from the woes and the worries of the day, and no newspaper with descriptions from the theater of war. Fortunately the Marconi system is not sufficiently advanced to give us daily tidings in full detail. That is destined to come about, but it is to be hoped that the news then will contain fewer barbarities. Ultimately the moral improvement of the world must keep step with the technical.
We went through a half hour of anxious excitement on the high seas. We were sitting comfortably on deck, reclining in our steamer chairs, engaged in reading or contemplation of the play of the waves, or lazily thinking of nothing at all, when suddenly a commotion began on board. There was a clamor of voices, and sailors ran hither and thither. The travelers rushed to one place on the quarter-deck.
“It is sinking!” cries one.
“What is sinking?” I inquire, with pardonable interest; “our ship?”
“No—do you see—yonder—”
Now [I], too, hasten to the rail; I see at some distance a sailing vessel, a three-master, rocking on the waves. It is on fire; our ship hastens toward her under full steam. Possibly there may be something there to be rescued,—even human beings raising agonized prayers for aid.
That was not the case; the vessel was a derelict. But if there had been men on board, how we should have trembled, how anxiously we should have followed the work of rescue that our captain would have set on foot with all zeal, and how we should have clamored with jubilation had he succeeded. Even if there had been no more than one man on board the unfortunate craft, and he had been rescued from the extremity of despair, what joy! But when the next Marconi dispatch brings the news of a bath of blood at Port Arthur or Mukden,—that is merely an interesting piece of news! What an insane contradiction! In regard to this I will only say that such things must cease, for contradictions cannot prevail; they annihilate themselves; that is the law of nature. The time will come when the sacred sea, that binds all nations together, that distributes wealth among them, that has been made serviceable through the powers of man for the aims of happiness, will be no longer desecrated by explosive mines and submarine instruments of destruction.
On the seventh day we entered the harbor of New York; the Statue of Liberty held out her torch to greet us,—a torch so great that a man can take a walk around its handle. But grand and triumphant as the statue is, its ideal falls below it even in America, which in the national hymn arrogates to itself the proud title, “Land of the noble free.” If ever there was a dream projected into the future, it is the dream of freedom, up to the present time unfulfilled everywhere, yet ripening toward fulfillment. Perhaps America, the young land unoppressed by ancient traditional fetters, is the land where that torch will first flame forth and then illuminate all the corners of the earth.
I had, by the way, my first taste of its lack of freedom, at the dock, where the vandals of the tariff rummaged in the depths of my trunks and subjected my fur cloak to a searching examination. Heaven be praised, it was not sealskin! And while I was trembling with the excitement of the inspection, three reporters were asking me about the programme of the Peace Congress and about the prospects of the war in eastern Asia.