Our universities and more progressive colleges are slowly but surely reshaping themselves on the lines indicated in the foregoing pages, and the time is not far distant when no graduate can be excused for being merely book-stuffed instead of educated.
CHAPTER XXVI.
OUR GREAT CONCERN.
OURS is the greatest land in the world, and we, the people of these United States, ought to be the greatest people.
At the present time it does not require any great amount of conceit to make us believe that we are superior to our neighbors, but it will not do to forget that the faculty of being up and growing is not one of which we have a monopoly.
One of the founders of the Republic said: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” He might have added that it is the price of pretty much everything else worth having and keeping.
We Americans have led the world in a great many respects in most unexpected ways and at unexpected times, but seldom does a year pass in which we do not discover that we have no monopoly of the art of taking the lead. In one way or other, some nations of the earth are continually showing themselves superior to us in some respects. We have needed a great many warnings of this kind, and we will need a great many more unless we act more promptly upon those which have already been granted us.
We have had enough success in other days to make us very conceited, so it is natural that occasionally we fall behind our competitors through the blindness of our fancied security. There was a time when American sails whitened every ocean, and more American ships could be seen in foreign ports than those of two or three other nations combined. The man who would now go out in a foreign port to look for an American flag, determining not to break his fast till he found one, would stand a fair chance of starving to death. Whether the disappearance of our flag from commerce is due only to the ravages of the Alabama and her sister privateers, or to the navigation laws now in force, is not to the point of the present situation, which is, that unexpectedly to ourselves and all the rest of the world we have taken the lowest position among the nations as carriers of what we have to buy and sell, and that we do not show any indications whatever of ever resuming our old position.
Another instance: Within the memory of half the people now alive, the world heard that Cotton was king, and, as cotton was obtainable only from America, Americans proudly assumed to be the commercial rulers of the world. Owing to a little family trouble on this side of the water, the other nations began to look about elsewhere for their cotton. They found some in unexpected places, and have been finding it there ever since. We still produce more cotton than any other country, but we are not kings of the cotton market any longer.
Then came the time when Corn was king. It is true we did not ship much of it in the grain, but between putting it into pork and putting it into whiskey, our corn became the first cause of the loading many thousands of ships to different foreign countries. Foreigners have eyes in their heads and they began to look about and see whether they could not produce pork and whiskey as cheaply as those people across the water, who had to send their products three thousand miles or more to find a market. They succeeded. At the present day, although our distilleries and pig-styes are in active operation, a great deal of distilled liquors and also a great deal of the meat of the hog comes this way across the ocean. The market still is good abroad for American hams, sides, shoulders, bacon and lard, but the bottom has dropped out of the whiskey market, and seems to show no signs of a desire to return.
For a number of years, and until very recently, our wheat had made us commercially, in one sense at least, the superior of all the other nations of the world. The finer breadstuffs were not to be had in Europe except from American sources. Year by year the price of wheat increased until the American farmer became so enviable an individual that a great many merchants went out of business, bought farms, and attempted to compete with him. As is usually the case when any business is so flourishing that every one wishes to go into it, endeavors were being made by hundreds of sharp-eyed observers to see whether wheat might not be more profitably produced in other portions of the world, and the success which attended these observations has been anything but gratifying to the American farmer. Russia and Hungary are producing more wheat than ever before. Wheat is pouring into Europe from Asia, and even from Africa, and the American farmer now is not quite so sure as to what will be the result of a good crop of wheat—not sure whether it will yield a profit or fail to pay expenses. Even the reductions in freight rates, alike from the agricultural districts to the seashore and from America to Europe, do not compensate him for the great reduction in the price of what once he fondly believed was an enduring source of profit. The time when it was safe to put an entire farm into wheat has passed. Farmers are studying mixed crops now with all the intelligence that is in them, for a man’s first duty is to earn food for his family.