Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2

by George S. Boutwell

Every decade of three centuries has added to the greatness of that one immortal name in the literature of the whole English speaking race. The security for the world that the name of Shakespeare and the writings of Shakespeare cannot die may be found in the selfishness, the intelligent selfishness of mankind, which will struggle constantly to preserve and to magnify a possession which if once lost, could never be regained.

After four centuries of delay we have come to realize, with some degree of accuracy, the magnitude of the event called the Discovery of America. Identified with that event, and as its author, is the man Columbus. Involved in controversies while living, the object of the base passions of envy, hatred and jealousy, consigned finally to chains and to prison, and in death ignorant of the magnitude of the discovery that he had made, there seemed but slight basis for the conjecture that his name was destined to become the one immortal name in the annals of modern Italy and Spain.

As if accident and fate and the paltry ambitions of men had combined to rob Columbus of his just title to fame, the name of the double continent that he discovered was given to another. To that other the name remains, but the continent itself has become the continent of Columbus. In connection with the event no other name is known, and so it will ever be in all the centuries of the future.

In these years we are inaugurating a series of centennial anniversary celebrations in honor of Columbus, and in testimony of the importance of the discovery that he made. This we do as the greatest of the states that have arisen on the continent that he discovered, and I delay what I have to say of Columbus and of the discovery that I may express my regret and the reasons for my regret, that the celebration and the ceremonies have not been made distinctively and exclusively national. In this I do not disparage, on the other hand I exalt, the public spirit, the capacity for large undertakings, the will and the courage of the city and the citizens of Chicago in assuming burdens and responsibilities from which any other city on this continent would have shrunk.

My point is this: If the people and Government of the United States were of the opinion that the discovery of a continent—a continent in which one of the great governments of the world has found an abiding place—was worthy of a centennial celebration, then the conduct of the celebration ought not to have been left to the care of any community less than the whole. Nor is it an unworthy thought that something of dignity would have been added to the celebration if the nations of the earth could have been invited to the capital which bears the name of the discoverer of the continent and the founder of the Republic.

There are occasions which confer greatness upon an orator. Such are revolutionary periods, the overthrow of states, radical changes in a long-settled public policy, struggles for power, empire, dominion. These and kindred exigencies in the affairs of men and states, seem to create, or at least to furnish opportunity and scope for, statesmen, orators, poets and soldiers.

This peaceful ceremony in peaceful times, of which we now speak, will not produce orators like Patrick Henry and James Otis at the opening of our Revolutionary struggle, like Mirabeau in France, or Cicero in Rome, pleading for a dying republic, or Demosthenes in Athens contending hopelessly against the domination of one supreme will.

An orator for this occasion was not to have been waited for, he was to have been sought out and found if possible.

If Webster were living and in the fullness of his powers, the country might have looked to him for an oration that would have so linked itself with the anniversary that it would have been recognized in every succeeding centennial observance.

Turning from this thought, which at best, can only serve as a standard to which our hopes aspire, I venture the remark, that there is not one of our countrymen who, by the studies of his life, by the philosophical qualities of his mind, by the possession in some large measure of that Miltonian power of imagination which Webster exhibited, is qualified for the supreme task which I have thus imperfectly outlined.