The Holy Earth

by L. H. Bailey

The rains of the land come from the sea; the clouds come ultimately from the sea; the trade-winds flow regularly from the sea; the temperatures of the land surface are controlled largely from the sea; the high lands are washed into the sea as into a basin; if all the continents were levelled into the sea still would the sea envelop the planet about two miles deep. Impurities find their way into the sea and are there digested into the universal beneficence. We must reckon with the sea.

It is supposed that the first life on the earth came forth where the land and the waters join, from that eternal interplay of cosmic forces where the solid and the fluid, the mobile and the immobile, meet and marry.

Verily, the ancestral sea is the background of the planet. Its very vastness makes it significant. It shows no age. Its deeps have no doubt existed from the solidification of the earth and they will probably remain when all works of man perish utterly.

The sea is the bosom of the earth's mysteries. Because man cannot set foot on it, the sea remains beyond his power to modify, to handle, and to control. No breach that man may make but will immediately fill; no fleets of mighty ships go down but that the sea covers them in silence and knows them not; man may not hold converse with the monsters in the deeps. The sea is beyond him, surpassing, elemental, and yet blessing him with abundant benedictions.

So vast is the sea and so self-recuperating that man cannot sterilize it. He despoils none of its surface when he sails his ships. He does not annihilate the realms of plankton, lying layer on layer in its deluging, consuming soil. It controls him mightily.

The seas and the shores have provided the trading ways of the peoples. The ocean connects all lands, surrounds all lands. Until recent times the great marts have been mostly on coasts or within easy water access of them. The polity of early settlements was largely the polity of the sea and the strand. The daring of the navigator was one of the first of the heroic human qualities. Probably all dry land was once under the sea, and therefrom has it drawn much of its power.

From earliest times the sea has yielded property common to all and free to whomever would take it,—the fish, the wrack, the drift, the salvage of ships. Pirates have roamed the sea for spoil and booty. When government appropriates the wreckage of ships and the stranded derelict of the sea, the people may think it justifiable protection of their rights to secrete it. Smuggling is an old sea license. Laws and customs and old restraints lose their force and vanish on the sea; and freedom rises out of the sea.

And so the ocean has contributed to the making of the outlook of the human family. The race would be a very different race had there been no sea stretching to the unknown, conjuring vague fears and stimulating hopes, bringing its freight, bearing tidings of far lands, sundering traditions, rolling the waves of its elemental music, driving its rank smells into the nostrils, putting its salt into the soul.