“But it isn’t our Canal any more,” ejaculated Sally. “It seems,” said Mr. Garrett, “as if our grief had been premature. There is enough to worry over in this frightful catastrophe, and its limits no one to-day can correctly estimate, but as Brig says, the Canal idea is saved, or at least it seems reasonable to believe that it may be. If Nature makes a bigger canal, if she changes the face of the earth enough, as Leacraft told us last night, to unite the oceans and make a strait, the commercial union of the western and eastern continents is secured on a larger scale. Perhaps our national pride must suffer some, but the fact remains, though, it would have saved our exchequer a handsome outlay, if nature, consulting our financial happiness, had done her work a little earlier.”
“If we’d only waited,” sighed Mrs. Garrett, ruefully.
They had reached the edges of the throngs who stood in the sun, engrossing every coigne of vantage, and an orderly, examining their tickets, conducted them through a narrow lane of envious gazers to a stand of seats to the south of the President’s rostrum. From this position their eyes fell directly upon the amazing outpouring of the people, an ocean of individuals, hopelessly cancelled from any chance to hear the President’s voice, yet extending outward in a solemn silence, and but furtively invaded by those busy concomitants of such public gatherings—button men and popcorn merchants. For the most part such annoyances were inordinately thrust aside, but scurrying over the most distant outposts of the mammoth audience, their eager shapes were seen, and inconstantly, borne inward by the breeze, the shrill invitation of their voices was heard.
Leacraft fixed his eyes upon the President, and he was near enough to him to note his expression. President Roosevelt sat squarely facing the people—now crushing in with an irresistible impulse from the distributed masses before him. He seemed serious, at moments almost solemnly so, at others he turned to his companions with alacrity, and his face even smiled at some allusion or whispered comment. Again his eyes wandered dreamily—Leacraft thought sadly—to his notes, and then he moved restlessly and leaned forward, and even half rose, eagerly scanning the expectant faces. A jumping up of half a dozen men at the rear of the platform, a signal of a waved handkerchief, followed, and the band, stationed somewhere behind the distinguished occupants of the platform, began the Star Spangled Banner. Everyone not already standing rose, heads even uncovered, and the spirited strains seized by the concourse, were flung back in a torrent of vocality, that sounded like the far and near thunder of the ocean’s surges. It was overwhelming. As if before the spirit of the Nation, the living and the dead; those whose discarnate beings might seem rushing in upon them from the viewless depths of space, summoned again to the fields of their endeavor by the marshall air, hats were doffed in all directions, until scarcely a covered head among the men remained, and many eyes streamed with irrepressible tears. The note of a requiem, the prouder challenge of defiance, the lofty questioning of Hope, the loving clasp of fraternal patriotism, the aspirations of a race, solving “in the foremost files of time” the problem of the world’s political creed, seemed blended together, in the avalanche of sound. And it was maintained to the end, even the verses of the national anthem were well remembered, and that trying and unattainable high note, like the scream of the eagle, which closes the lips of most singers in dubious apathy, was now sustained. The President sang lustily, and then he stopped, his head bowed; he might have been in prayer. It was noticed by all and it almost seemed as if the music quailed and sank before the mystery of a man’s outpoured petition to his God.
It was over. The music ceased, the frail voice of the chairman sounded its quavering invitation to prayer, and a clergyman arose and droned an invocation. The President was introduced and stood forward. He was well in view. One hand grasped the railing before him, the other clutched some separated papers, he looked well and the man’s vitality, his zealous unmitigated self exaction were realized. As he was seen, the tumult rose to a tremendous climax, cheers rolled forward and backward like the fluctuating billows of a sea; they receded to the outer margins far toward the Hagerstown road, where they vanished in murmurs, they crashed inward in volleying thunders, and the President stood erect, nerved to a steel-like rigidity; the air was swept with flags, the intoxication of the emotion increased, women palled before it, and men grew pale with the delirium of sudden enthusiasm. It seemed as if music alone could lead them back into the resignation of attention. It was a stupendous tribute. The man to whom it was given, had no reason for misgiving, no retributive judgments for his actions, to dread. Slowly, very slowly the cheering and cries died away, and then ensued a silence as remarkable and as impressive. The two contrasted states of the multitude might have been interpreted as a generous invitation to the man to speak, and as a judicial reservation of mind as to its own verdict when he had spoken. It almost seemed so, and the quick heart of the President might again have felt the palpitation of a doubt, whether he stood approved, or a critical people withdrew into the refuge of an impartial scrutiny. Leacraft felt all this, and he could not help also feeling a curious interest in the purely psychological enigma it presented.
The President was speaking; his voice reached Leacraft thin and sharp:
“My friends,” he began, “To-day we celebrate again the brave deaths of brave men, and the sacrifices they made for the maintenance of our common country. And we are gathered together on the battlefield which more than any other battlefield in that historic war, represented the culminating energies of both sides, the last vital contention for the mastery. These men left behind them the inestimable example of fortitude. And after the battle of Gettysburg it was more difficult for the southern man to continue the fight, in the face of disaster, with a depleted country behind him, and a foe flushed with victory, and drawing upon almost illimitable resources, than for his northern brother, for whom at last the tide of war seemed to have turned. We to-day need the lesson of this fortitude of the man in gray.
“My friends, a disaster has overtaken us,”—the crowd before the President seemed to compress itself in a further effort to get closer to him, “and it is our duty to remain firm and unfalteringly confident. I can scarcely doubt that you all have heard that nature has destroyed the Nation’s work. The face of the earth at the Isthmus of Panama is altered. Our work, our expenditures, the lives of thousands of hard working men have been sacrificed, and we stand aghast before a natural revolution unequaled in our day, unparalled perhaps in all the annals of history; something which in its wide devastating power, crushes our pride, and for a moment makes us cease to think, to plan, to build. I come to you this morning with strange tidings—tidings so unspeakably great in their influence upon our knowledge, that I almost hesitate to pronounce them, lest I might find myself the victim of some horrible and wicked hoax. The Isthmus of Panama, from Quibo Island in Montijo Bay, on the west, to the confines of the valley of the Atrato River at the edge of the Columbia, on the east, is deviously, here with a regular movement of depression, in another place with violent shock, sinking beneath the waters of the opposite encroaching oceans that swings backward and forward on either side in awful tidal deluges.
“The latest news confirms all the previous reports. Slowly, surely, even with hastening steps, the narrow neck of Panama, with its shallow shores, its long exposure of swamp and mud flats, with its crumbling hills, covered with tropical life will be engulfed, and the two continents of North and South America will return to a pristine condition of geographical autonomy. It is hard to believe. I cannot recount to you the wonderful pictures, terror-inspiring, and yet majestic with the majesty of Nature’s awful deeds, which have been sent to us. The loss of life has been considerable, but not proportionate to the stupendous agencies involved. After the first earthquake upheavals, the quickly succeeding disappearance of the solid ground furnished an adequate warning, and the populations along the canal-way at the villages and camps, and at Aspinwall and Panama, retreated to the hills, and with them the animal life, in a singular copartnership of fear. It is now regarded as certain, that we are about to see the last vestiges of the canal itself, the work of these last four years disappearing in the folding in and submergence of the rock strata.”
The President then told the story of the catastrophe as it had been narrated in the despatches received at the White House. He painted in graphic words the shaking down of the hills, the dislodged blankets slipping from the hill sides like a shawl from a shuddering woman, carrying with them the crashing trees, the jungle growth, the entwined tendrilous creepers and vines, while above the trees, swaying toward each other and then outward as if following the crests and troughs of hidden waves, above these tottering trees, the birds in screaming volleys rose and fell. The bared rocks showed rents, and tremendous explosions sent their shattered fragments into the air, while long weird groans issued from the ground as if the buried foundations of the hills were undergoing the tortures of mutilation. In other places it had been quite different. The ground slowly seemed to melt away, and with a sort of shuddering succession of chills the land disappears. How long, how much further this swallowing up of the land will go no one can tell. But it has seemed to those who have some knowledge of the region that it may embrace the S shaped Isthmus only, and that the tapering ends of the bulwarks of elevation in the Rocky Mountain chain on the north, and the Andes on the south will resist this degradation, that Costa Rica on the north and Columbia on the south will rudely define the north and south edges of the new avenue or gateway of unions between the oceans, that the new canal in this way, reconstructed by the titanic convulsions of nature, will become a wide and useful passage for commerce.