"My country, 'tis of thee!" / Or, the United States of America; past, present and future. A philosophic view of American history and of our present status, to be seen in the Columbian exhibition.

by Willis Fletcher Johnson

“This Exposition—on a new site, in a new world—assumes greater dimensions than a market for merchandise or than figures of finance. We should make it a congress of the nations wherein agriculture, manufactures, and commerce should be the handmaids of ideas—where art should paint the allegory of Peace and chisel the statue Fraternity—where music should play a dirge to dead hastes and an epithalamium on the marriage of the nations.

“Our country has led the advance in peaceful arbitration. The Geneva Commission, the Fisheries Commission in the settlement of difficulties already existing, the Pan-American Congress has opened the way for the peaceful settlement of questions that may arise hereafter to the people of the hemisphere. I regard these great achievements of our capital government as more illustrious than any act of any government since our great Civil War.

“Let the Exposition be fruitful in profit, not only to the exhibitors, but to all comers, and that they shall carry away a higher conception of the duty of the citizen and the mission of the State. Our material power is very great, too great for us to act on any other plane than the highest. Our resources and capacity to meet our financial obligations are a wonder to the powers of the old world. It should be our aim to make our moral altitude on all public questions, national or international, as unassailable as our monetary credit. Our bonds are higher in the markets of the world than any other—our opinions and acts should, relatively, hold as high a place.

“The first 400 years have passed—they have been illuminated by the heroic deeds of men and women, and shaded by crimes, national and individual. The descendants of the Puritans and Cavalier, of the Huguenot and the Catholic, of the slave and the Indian, together with those from other continents and the isles of the sea meet in peaceful rivalry where the forest fades away and the prairie expands.

“At last we are a nation with common inheritance. Lexington and Yorktown, Bunker Hill and Eutaw, Saratoga and Guildford Court House, New Orleans and Plattsburg, are our common glory.

“We have people to the north and south who can be linked to us with hooks of steel if we continue to retain their respect and confidence. I want no forcible addition to our territory, were it practicable. I want them to come as a bride comes to her husband—in love and confidence—and because they wish to link their fortunes with ours, to make their daily walk by our side. To bring about this consummation will be the work of time, of forbearance, of rigid observance of their rights, of due regard for their prejudices, of an unselfish desire for welfare—wherein all the amenities of life shall be cultivated. We must enforce their respect by order at our own home, and show them that our composite civilization—wherein we select all that is good from abroad, and retain all that is good in our own, is calculated to make them also happier and greater.

“Should this occasion, this National Exposition, promote such a purpose as if we are rightly inspired, this meeting of all people would be more than a financial success—more than a vain commercial triumph. It would emphasize the new era, which I hope is dawning, and take the initiative in what may result in the federation of this hemisphere.”

Thus the Columbian Exhibition will nobly close the first four centuries of American history, and by the splendor of its display shed brilliant rays upon the unknown years and centuries to come. The future must be estimated from the past and the present. As the present is grander than the past, so, may we hope, will the future be grander than the present.

Mr. Chauncey M. Depew has drawn this comparison most graphically.

“At the time of the Centennial Exhibition we had 45,000,000 people; now our numbers reach the grand total of 64,000,000. Then we had thirty-seven States, but we have since added seven stars to our flag. Then the product of our farms in cereals was about $2,200,000,000; now it is over $4,000,000,000. Then the output of our factories was about $5,000,000,000; now it is over $7,000,000,000. Such progress, such development, such advance, such accumulation of wheat and the opportunities for wealth—wealth in the broad sense, which opens new avenues for employment and fresh chances for independence and for homes—have characterized no other similar period of recorded time.