[Speech of Murat Halstead at the 126th annual banquet of the Chamber of
Commerce of the State of New York, November 20, 1894. Alexander B.
Orr, President of the Chamber, in proposing this toast, said: "I now
have the honor of introducing to you that eminent journalist, the Hon.
Murat Halstead, who will respond to the toast, 'Our New Country.'"]
MR. PRESIDENT:--In the Orkney Islands there is a cathedral
described by the guide as of two parts--the old and the new. The story
is glibly told that when it had stood for five hundred years a storm
beat down the tower and did other damage, making reconstruction
necessary; and that tempest was six hundred years ago. On the road from
Geneva to Chamouni there is a point of which Bædeker says: "The rocks
on the left are seven thousand feet high." In the Orkneys a tower six
hundred years old is new, and in the Alps a precipice seven thousand
feet high is a moderate bit of scenery. The standards of the measurement
of time and space may be exact, and yet are comparative, affected by the
atmosphere of history and the scale of landscapes.
In that portion of this country which was the West a generation ago, a
farm was old when the stumps had rotted in the fields, and the land was
improved when the trees were cut. New ground was that which had not been
ploughed. Once a man of varied experiences accounted to a pious woman
for an unhappy bit of profanity by saying that when a boy he had
ploughed new ground, and the plough caught in the roots, and the horses
balked, and his feet were torn with splinters and thorns, and the
handles of the plough kicked and hurt him, until depravity was
developed. The lady said she would pray for his forgiveness, if he
never would do so any more, and he promised, and I am told he did not
keep that promise.
Daniel Boone's new country, when he lived on the Yadkin, in North
Carolina, was Kentucky, and afterward it was Missouri. Washington's new
country was first Ohio, and then Indiana. Lincoln's new country, when he
was a child, was Indiana, and then Illinois. Beyond the Alleghany
Mountains was the land of promise of the original States; beyond the
Mississippi was the new world of those who moved west in wagons, before
the Mexican war and the railroads broadened our dominions, and we were
bounded east and west by the oceans. It was for the new country of their
ages that Columbus and the Puritans and Captain John Smith set sail. In
the new country there is always, at least, the dream of liberty and the
hope that the earth we inherit may be generous in the bounties it yields
to toil.
The march of manhood westward has reached the shores of the seas that
look out on ancient Asia. We have realized the vision of the
Genoese--finding in the sunset the footsteps of Marco Polo. We have
crossed the mountain ranges and followed the majestic rivers, have
traced the borders of the great lakes, whitened by the sails and
darkened by the smoke of a commerce that competes in magnitude with that
of the salted sea; and Texas, our France, confronts the Mediterranean of
our hemisphere.
We have crushed the rocks and sifted the sand that yielded silver and
gold, and the soil is ours that is richer than gold mines, whether we
offer in evidence South Carolina, whose Sea-Island cotton surpasses the
long staple of Egypt; or the Dakotas, matchless for wheat; or the lands
of the cornstalk in the Mississippi Valley, that could feed all the
tribes of Asia; or Nebraska, whose beets are sweeter with sugar than
those that were the gift of Napoleon to Germany.
We have found the springs that yield immortal youth, not in bubbling
waters in a flowery wilderness, but in the harvests of the fields and
the stored energies of inexhaustible mines, not for the passing person
who perishes when his work is done, but for the imperishable race.
All this in our country, "rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun," but with
the clothing of life on the ribs, and new in the evolution of
conditions by the works of man that make the nations of the earth a
family--achievements wonderful in scope, splendid in promise, marvellous
in the renown that is of peace; in the fame of the genius that is labor,
the spell-binder that gathers and builds, creates and glorifies.
Within the historic record of this Chamber of Commerce of New York, the
waters of Lake Erie have been carried through our canals and rivers to
the Atlantic, making the Hudson River what Henry Hudson thought it was
when he sailed through the beautiful gate of the incomparable
continent--the road from the east to the west around the world; and the
statue of Thomas Benton points westward from the great cross of the
rivers in the heart of the continent--the Ohio, Missouri and
Mississippi--and the inscription reads: "There is the road to India."
How familiar is the construction of the Pacific railroad; of the
telegraph lines across the continent and through the oceans; the record
of steamers of ten thousand tons, five hundred knots a day; the
miraculous telephone; the trolley, that is with us to stay and to
conquer, introducing all the villages to the magic of rapid transit,
promoting, with the incessant application of a new force, the American
homogeneity of our vast and various population--blending them for one
destiny. One is not venturing upon disputed ground--there is no
prohibited politics in it to say that slavery is gone--for all classes
and sections of our common country will agree it is well. The earth has
grown both small and great for us. Its gigantic mysteries are no more.
Its circumnavigation is commonplace. The kinetoscope comes to aid the
phonograph to make pictures of action and lasting records of music and
of speech. The people of coming generations are to hear the voices that
have charmed or awed, persuaded, bewitched or commanded, in departed
centuries. There will be libraries of rolls, storing for all time these
treasures; rolls not unlike those cylinders preserved in the Babylonish
deserts. Photography is bringing to us, as on parchment leaves painted
with sunlight, the secrets of the depths of the seas and the skies; it
is finding new stars, and with the telescopic camera likenesses may be
snatched across spaces impenetrable by the naked eye. The aristocracy of
intelligence becomes a democracy for the diffusion of the knowledge of
the history of the day, which is the most important chapter that has
been written, impartial, instantaneous, and is becoming universal.
This is more than a new country; it is a new world. Our own farmers are
in competition with those of Egypt, India, Russia and Argentina.
Australia with her wool and beef and mutton, Egypt and India with cotton
and wheat, South America, Africa and Asia, made fruitful with resources,
seek the same markets with our producers; and the mills of Old England
are within a few cents and hours, in cost of transportation and time, as
cheap and nigh as those of New England to New York. Once, a war between
Japan and China would have been so remote that, as they say in the
newspapers, there could have been no news in it; but it means matter of
business for us now. With the novel conditions, there come upon us new
and enormous problems for solution, and responsibilities that cannot be
evaded. Once, we were an isolated nation. There was no trouble about
becoming involved in the "entangling alliances" that were the cause of
alarm to the Father of his Country. Now, the ends of the earth are in
our neighborhood, and we touch elbows with all the races of mankind, and
all the continents and the islands are a federation. The newspapers are,
to continue the poetic prophecy, "the parliament of man."
The drift of human experience is to increased aggregations, to
concentration and to centralization. This mighty city, in her material
grandeur, and, we may trust, her moral redemption, stands for forty-six
indestructible States and one indivisible nation. Her lofty structures
far surpass already the palaces of the merchant princes of Tyre and
Venice and Liverpool, and we behold, in these imperial towers, the types
of the magnificence of the coming time. There never was so fair and
superb, ample and opulent a bride as she, in the wholesome arms of the
ocean that embrace these islands, adorned with the trophies of the
wealth of the world, and whose rulers, the slavery of crime abolished,
are the sovereign millions. These are new developments of authority, new
growths of responsibility.
The Congress, forty years ago, was a body insignificant in its relations
with the masses of the people, in comparison with what it is to-day. It
grapples, of necessity, with the new conditions, and the character of
the public service is of enlarged consequence, for it is to all the
communities and commonwealths far more comprehensive and penetrating in
its influence than in other days; and it is well the citizens of the
Republic are aroused to appreciation of their added requirements in the
care that public life must give the general welfare.
During the recent popular experience of Christian science applied to
practical politics, that resulted, among other things, in the intimacy
of representative men of the Bowery and the Fifth Avenue, that allows
the citizens of each locality to walk into the other locality at bedtime
and select their sleeping-rooms, without asking whether the folks are at
home, and to depart with or without leaving their P. P. C. cards, one of
the speakers, noting in his audience evidences of dissent, said: "If I
am speaking in a way that is prerogatory, while I want to go on, I am
willing to quit." He honored his nativity by his modesty, and was
allowed to go on; but he preferred to sit down, though his theme seemed
to him to expand under treatment, and with his new word he retired. I
quote him as a precedent and example for immediate imitation. It is more
than a joke, though, that Fifth Avenue and the Bowery have got together,
and we may hope they will work well for the good of this new country.
[Prolonged applause.]