In the case of Hawaii the American Republic seems likely to depart from its traditional policy of acquiring no territory beyond American bounds. The Hawaiian Islands were won from barbarism by the efforts and sacrifices of American missionaries and their descendants. A republic has been established there, and intelligent Hawaiians look hopefully forward to a common future with the United States. There is hardly a doubt that this hope will be fulfilled, and that the Eden of Southern seas will become an outpost of American civilization. With the two great English speaking nations of America and Australia confronting each other across the Pacific, that ocean is certain to be in the twentieth century the theatre of grand events, perhaps of future Actiums and Trafalgars. In Hawaii we will have a Malta worthy of such a mighty arena, and the flames of Kilauea will be a beacon fire of American liberty to the teeming millions of Asia.
The Behring Sea negotiations have from the first been discreditable to diplomacy at Washington. The attempt to prove that the fur-seals are domestic animals, and the property of the United States when a hundred miles out in the Pacific Ocean was a humiliating reflection on the intelligence of both parties to the dispute, and showed abject and degrading subserviency to the corporation controlling the seal monopoly. Added to this was the disgrace of forgery, detected, unfortunately, not at Washington, but in London, and indicating that, while Washington officials were doubtless innocent of complicity in the crime, the forger knew, or thought he knew, what was wanted. The end is that this country has to pay about $400,000 to England, while the seals are abandoned to destruction, which at least will have the happy effect of removing them as a cause of international controversy.
The assassination of President Garfield, July 2, 1881, by a disappointed seeker for office made that President the martyr of civil service reform, and gave an irresistible impulse to the movement to alleviate the evils of what is known as the "spoils system." Notwithstanding the opposition of politicians and newspapers representing the vicious and ignorant element, civil service reform has made marvelous progress, and the principle is now recognized not only in appointments to the vast majority of non-elective offices under the National Government, but also in the civil service of States and municipalities.
An unfortunate consequence of the vast growth of individual and corporate wealth, after the war, was the widening of the division line between capital and labor. The depression consequent upon the collapse of inflated values in 1873 compelled employers to reduce expenses, and made harder the lot of labor, while the workingman who saw his wages reduced was not always willing to make intelligent allowance for the circumstances which made the reduction necessary. The spirit of discontent reached the point of eruption in 1877, when railway employees throughout a large part of the Union abandoned their work, and indulged in riot and disorder. The struggle raged most fiercely in the city of Pittsburg, which was subjected for some days to the reign of a mob, and to perils seldom surpassed save in the tragic scenes of old-world barricades and revolution. The County of Allegheny had to settle for damages to the amount of $2,772,349.53, of which $1,600,000 went to the Pennsylvania Railroad. Chicago, Baltimore and Reading were also the scenes of severe and sanguinary conflict between rioters and the militia. It was estimated that about 100,000 workers were engaged in the strike in various parts of the country.
Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois and other States have witnessed serious labor troubles since 1877, and the regular army of the United States was employed by order of President Cleveland to put down unlawful interference with interstate commerce in 1894; but the general tendency of workingmen is to obtain redress for real or imaginary grievances in a law-abiding manner by securing the election of officials favorable to their interests. This is the only method of redress that can be tolerated in a republic.
The great fires of Chicago in 1871, and of Boston in 1872, the Charleston earthquake of 1886 and the Johnstown flood of 1889, were among the most memorable of the destructive visitations which have served signally to illustrate the energy, the generosity, and the recuperative power of the American people. Chicago, with $200,000,000 of property swept away by the flames, laid amid the ashes the foundations of that new Chicago which is the inland metropolis of the continent, brimming with the spirit of American progress, and the blood in every vein bounding with American energy. Boston plucked profit from disaster by establishing her claim as the modern Athens in architecture as well as literature, and Charleston learned, amid her ruins, that northern sympathy was not bounded by Mason and Dixon's line. The South taught a similar lesson in return when the cry from flood-stricken Johnstown touched every merciful heart.