The President indulged the evident curiosity of his popular audience in a scientific discourse. His own interest was evident. He discussed earthquakes; he plunged into an essay on volcanoes; he spread luminously before the people the theories of the pear-shaped earth, the slipping of faults, the loading of the earth’s crust, the original formation of the deep creases in the earth’s surface, which now held its gathered waters. The President made a model expositor. He was clear and interesting. His style, his illustrative similes were attractive and deliberately helpful. It was almost amusing to note the contrasted effect of this improvised academic demonstration upon the people and upon the political sages of the platform. The former were attentive and absorbed. Their faces lit up with the quiet pleasure of intelligent appreciation, frequently at some pungent expression that pictured to them in stirring forcible photographic phrase the stifling struggle of land and water, the fierce unrest far down there in the tropics, which was unsettling the foundations of the earth, and slowly establishing a new order of things, pregnant with revolution in the day and fate of nations, carrying in its geological material insensate womb of meaning the dissolution of states, the upset and consternation of rulers, a menace to civilization, the ruthless unwavering threat to human accidents and institutions.
To all this the political magnates listened with bored indifference. They expected a party appeal, some appetizing bid for popular suffrage, a shot at the South, a resounding puff for the Republican candidates, a public acknowledgement of their personal industry in securing the re-election of himself, new projects of expenditure, and a programme of national expansion. They turned and twisted, and some deliberately slept or engaged in low conversations with an expressive irony of shrugs and smiles.
The President paused, his hands came together, and he leaned far forward, and a moment’s hesitancy marked the termination of his scientific periods. He continued, with sudden earnestness and vigour, with almost self-surrender to the impetus of his thought: “My friends, these are the facts, and no lamentations can change them. We must learn from the courage and devotion of the men who left this field defeated, to face this new predicament, not with resignation, simply, but with the constructive determination to seize this new turn in events and force it into our service, to make it only a more complete realization of our first designs. This is the triumph of Opportunity. Thus shall we wrest from the confusion of chance its empire of the fitting moment, and drive its scattered impulses into the straight, the narrow path of our strictest needs. The canal as a commercial necessity cannot be eclipsed or abandoned. The original project is replaced. Replaced by something greater, more permanent, more cosmopolitan. It becomes no longer a provincial fact, a national asset simply. It is a feature of the earth.
“What exactly has happened, how complete is the transformation no one exactly knows, but if the assistance of engineering is still to be invoked it can only be in a way of a help to nature. The facts remain.
“And now my friends a stranger possibility confronts us, nay it lifts up a sinister and awful, an ominous portent for the leading nations of the world. It seems likely that this physical alteration may mean a change in the climate of the older portion of the earth.”
Again the President launched into a scientific lecture and he was fortunate, as at first, as alertly careful, as broadly popular, as adroitly technical, without obscurity. It was well received. And its conclusion was altogether wonderful. Leacraft had good reason to listen with all his ears.
The President described the contrasted temperatures of similar latitudes in Europe and America, how England on the latitude of Labrador was warmer than New York which found its Adirondack mountains—chilled in the depth of winter to almost forty degrees below zero—on the same degree as southern France; itself the type and synonym of warmth. He made it clear how the thermal flood of warm waters upon the shores of Europe—heating the drifting airs above it till, laden with moisture, they too added their gifts of rain and warmth to Great Britain, and the shores of Scandinavia; how this Gulf Stream, a wayward impressionable wandering river pushing past Florida with a cubic capacity of seven hundred thousand cubic feet of water in half a second of time, and, held in its fluctuating course by the laws of gravity, how this marvellous oceanic flood, controlled the material conditions of England’s greatness; grasped, as it were, in the filmy fingers of its webbed and spreading tides, its wealth, its maritime supremacy, its intellectual distinction, its domestic thrift, and sunny sweetness. And then the President ended, and Leacraft bent forward, gripped the railing before him with sudden fierceness, a knell strangely appalling sounded in his ears, a portent widely distracting and unreasonable drove the color from his cheeks.
The President ended with these words: “The Gulf Stream whipped into violent activity by the south east trade winds beats impetuously upon the islands of the West Indies, washes the beaches of Central America, and whirls its spinning tides within the Gulf of Mexico, and then, repulsed by the continuous shore lines of North America, returns to Europe bearing its mantle of verdure to be thrown over the hills, the capes, the valleys the western edges and islands of the Old World. But now the barrier is gone. The Gulf Stream before the strong and rapacious winds is no longer turned aside by impossible walls of land but triumphantly sweeps into the Pacific, and with it vanishes the glory of England. For ourselves it means singular disaster though it may bring compensating changes. If England disappears as a world power we are robbed of a friend, we have lost a market. What words shall measure the moral meaning of the first, what revenues express the yearly increasing value of the latter. We stand on the threshold of a New Era.”
The termination of this remarkable address was its most momentous and unexpected announcement. As the President sat down, there was no applause, just a ripple of clapping hands as a half-hearted recognition of an invariable habit. The speech had been utterly robbed of political significance, despoiled of rhetorical or personal emphasis, it failed entirely as the usual thing in public oratory, and it left behind it an oppressive sense of impending changes. The President seemed depressed by his own vaticinations, and those around him, chilled into anxious forebodings, sat stiffly silent and unresponsive. The moment was saved from intolerable embarrassment by the band.
The leader stepped forward, waved his baton and the solemn strains of America—the transplanted hymn of England—rose plaintively, like a prayer; to Leacraft it sounded like encouragement, like sympathy. Someone began to sing—hats came off, the guests rose, and the multitude sang. If the Star Spangled Banner had been exultant and triumphant, thronged with the memories of achievement and victory—America throbbed with supplication, and underneath the supplication, the fervor of allegiance, sacrifice and love. The peculiar awkwardness of an unusual, an unique predicament, was removed. The speakers following the President made no allusion to the Canal, and all the marvellous happenings far away in Central America. They led the people’s thought back again to the soil they stood upon, to the memories of a glorious past, to the hopes of the future, the realization of the present tasks, the reiteration of the nation’s wealth and happiness, its strength under misfortune, its illimitable resources. They were successful. The pall of misgivings which the President had invoked was lifted. The band broke out again with reassuring liveliness, and good humour and holiday satisfaction revived.