Yet we shall do best to dismiss forebodings, and to cling, as still we may, to the faith and hope that was part of the American birthright. Indeed, we find it difficult to study even our grim columns of figures, our unimaginative records of events, without still retaining the curious and awesome feeling that heretofore the settlement of the American West, the birth and growth of the American man, has been a matter of fate, of destiny. There seemed to be a mighty west-bound tide of humanity of which we were but spectators, if indeed we were not part of the tide’s burden of hurried flotsam, carried forward without plan or aim or purpose.
We go on apparently still without plan, apparently still borne forward in a throng resistless as of yore. Perhaps in the forefront of our ranks we carry trump of Jericho for other lands; if not in the bugle note of our armies, at least in the humming of our commerce. Let us hope that we do not invite a trumpet call at our own walls.
A million dead men are forgotten. Our wars are as nothing. But a million live men, taken up bodily from one environment, and set down bodily in another environment in any antipodal quarter of the world—that means history; that spells questions in forethought; that bids rise an American statesmanship big and honest, not selfish, not corrupt, and not afraid! These questions are such as must be approached wholly without reference to party or to politics.
It has been hitherto in America not so much a question of politics as of roads; but now the roads are builded that shall lead us to our City of Desire or to our Castle of Despair. Steam will establish our doctrines and our tariffs. But steam has no soul. To it, our flap-hatted frontiersman, our new-American, our product of a noble and unparalleled evolution, is but the same as the wrinkled-booted foreigner that puts down his black box in the middle of a Dakota prairie or in the heart of a crowded Eastern city. Steam has no care for the real glory of our flag. It cares naught for character. It does not love humanity. In it dwells no ancient love for the history of an America which at least might once have been dear to the heart of all humanity. Steam is an equalizer. It breaks down the lines between nations. It makes America like unto Europe, causing us to change to meet the changes of the Old World. If we be not careful we shall see going forward that equalizing of humanity that is brutalizing. And then in the good time of the ages we shall see cataclysm, revolution, change.
Whatever the product of that change after the revolutions that are yet to be, no man of all the future will ever again behold a land like that American West which is now no more. That was indeed a land rich in the bounty of nature, rich in opportunity for humanity. It was a land where a man could indeed be a man; where indeed he might live honestly and cleanly and nobly, unshrinking from his fate, unfearing for his own survival, helpful to his neighbor, independent as to himself.
Now we have seen our old rider going far, our flap-hatted man, the fearless one. He has strange company to-day, at home and abroad. In all reverence, let us hope that God may prosper him! In all reverence, let us hope that there may never arise from the great and understanding soul of any leader of this country that sad and bitter cry, “Give me back my Americans!”
| [66] | Canada does not lack a fearless view in some of these matters. In 1902 a prominent journal of Halifax, N. S., boldly compared British and American institutions: “Had our forefathers thrown in their lot with the other American colonies at the time of the Revolution,” says this journal editorially, “Nova Scotia would now be a greater Massachusetts. The Dominion of Canada would have five-fold its wealth and population.” Per contra, American emigrants face some facts which to-day are not wholly satisfactory. Taxation in Canada in 1901 was $10 per capita, and but $7.50 per capita in the United States. To-day the debt of the Dominion is $66 per capita, whereas that of the United States figures but $14.52. In proportion to population, Canada has twice as much foreign trade as the United States; yet much of her foreign trade is with the United States. The Dominion of Canada clings still to the mother country, but in these modern days, the lines between states and provinces and governments become annually more faint. Life bases itself upon the doctrine of the survival of the fittest. The interdependence of a mutual self interest makes the strongest bonds between peoples, between governments, or between government and people. |
| [67] | Unless it might perhaps be the republic, France, from whom took the difficult doctrine that all men are “free and equal.” |