“No more shall nation against nation rise.”
The Congress of 1892 builded even better than it knew, when it dropped
partisan prejudices, and arose superior to local fetterings, and, in a
truly national spirit, secured for the United States of America dominion
of the seas and control of the commerce of the world.
The Act of Congress which guaranteed the payment of five per cent bonds
of the Nicaragua Canal Company to the extent of $100,000,000, and which
provided that the canal tolls upon American ships should never be more
than two-thirds the amount charged the vessels of other nations, enabled
the company to construct the canal with unexpected rapidity, without
calling upon the United States for a dollar of the guaranty, while, more
than any subsidy or favorable mail contract, it aided to place the Stars
and Stripes at the mastheads of the vast fleet of ships and steamers
which, upon the completion of the canal in the autumn of 1895, began to
pass between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
The local traffic developed by the canal proved something phenomenal.
Early in the history of its construction it became generally known that
the country, for hundreds of miles about Lake Nicaragua, was not an
unhealthy tropical jungle, but an elevated, breezy table-land, environed
and divided by snow-clad mountains, with an average temperature only a
few degrees warmer than that of California, and with a much more even
distribution of rainfall.
A knowledge of these advantages was followed by a large incursion of
American settlers. There is perhaps no product of field or forest more
profitable than the coffee plant. Steadily the demand for the fragrant
berry is upon the increase, while, beside having few enemies in the
insect world, the area within which coffee can be advantageously grown
is very limited. While the coffee plant does not require an
exceptionally hot climate, it will not thrive where frost is a
possibility. The hill slopes and table-lands of Nicaragua were found to
be peculiarly adapted for its growth, and thousands of acres of young
plantations were already thriving where for centuries only wild grasses
had waved. Short lines of railroad, centering on Lake Nicaragua, and
running in every direction, had made accessible a large extent of
country. The scream of the gang saw was heard amid forests of dyewoods,
rosewood, and mahogany. Mines of gold, silver, copper, iron, and coal
were opened. Cotton, sugar, and indigo plantations were developed, and
Millerville, on Lake Nicaragua, when the war ships passed through the
canal to attend David Morning’s dynamic exposition, was already a city
of fifty thousand people, provided with electric lights and cable roads.
The advantages to the people of the United States of the completed
Nicaragua Ship Canal were almost incalculable. The freight-carrying
business of the world between the east coast of Asia and Europe was
rapidly transferred to American bottoms. The iron manufacturers of
Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia were given an opportunity, previously
denied them, of marketing the product of their furnaces and foundries on
the Pacific Coast of North America. The dwellers in the Mississippi
Valley could now send their cotton, meats, and manufactures to
trans-Pacific and Antipodean markets, and California redwood and Puget
Sound fir and cedar lumber could be sent over all the Northwest.
On the Pacific Coast the canal added twenty-five per cent to the
productive value of every acre of grain and timber land. The cost of
sacking, and half the cost of transporting wheat was saved to the
farmer, and the freight upon all machinery and heavy goods brought from
the East was greatly lessened.
On Puget Sound the construction of a ship canal, costing less than
$2,000,000, connecting the fresh waters of Lake Washington with the salt
water in Elliott Bay, gave to Seattle such facilities for warehousing,
loading, and dry-docking, and such independence of tides and teredos,
that a commercial rival of San Francisco was spreading over the hills of
the fir-fringed Queen of the New Mediterranean, while at the extreme
southwestern corner of the republic the city of bay and climate—San
Diego—was rapidly regaining the population and prestige which
temporarily slipped from her grasp at the subsiding of the boom which,
during 1886 and 1887, enkindled the imagination, and beguiled the
judgment, and encrazed with the fever of speculation, the people of
Southern California.
Even during the dull times which annihilated so many promising fortunes
in Southern California, the attractions of Coronado Beach were
sufficient to secure for it exemption from the dire distress which
overtook other localities.
The company owning this enterprise successfully defied not only a
bursted boom but the very forces of nature, for they riprapped the beach
in front of their hotel, and baffled the Pacific Ocean, which, after
gnawing up the lawn and shrubbery which fronted its restless waters, had
set its foam-capped legions at work to undermine the foundations of the
great ballroom.
Parks, avenues, and streets were improved, museums and gardens
developed, and races and hops and fishing and boating parties
encouraged. Excursions from neighboring cities were organized, the East
was flooded with pamphlets praising Coronado, and the pleasure-loving
and health-seeking world was in every way reminded that in this land of
rare delights it could pick ripe oranges and enjoy surf bathing in
midwinter, while Boston was shivering and New York swept with blizzards.
The band at the hotel was kept playing every day at luncheon and dinner,
and it discoursed sweet music in the ballroom regularly upon hop nights
to auditors, who found—as all people can find—more of the physical
comforts and delights of life at Coronado Beach than anywhere else in
the world, for nowhere else is there such music in the sea, such balm in
the air, such sunshine, and fragrance, and healing, and rest.
The faith and patience of the owner of the great hotel were, in the end,
rewarded. Month by month and year by year did the numbers of his guests
increase, until, in 1895, the capacity of the house was more than
doubled, by the addition of a building something over a quarter of a
mile in length, and the great hotel could now accommodate quite two
thousand guests.
David Morning selected Coronado Beach for his dynamic experiments, and,
with some difficulty, chartered the entire hotel for one month, during
which time it was reserved exclusively for his guests. He also leased
the northerly end of the Coronado Beach peninsula for the construction
and equipment of his air ship, and for a laboratory for the manufacture
of potentite.
The real Coronado Islands are within the territorial jurisdiction of
Mexico, situated about sixteen miles south and west from San Diego Bay,
and were, except in cloudy weather, distinctly visible from Coronado
Beach. Irregular and ragged masses of red sandstone a few thousand acres
in extent towered to a height of several hundred feet above the ocean,
faintly staining the horizon with patches of blue, resembling an
unfinished sky in water color.
These islands were destitute of water and vegetation, and never
inhabited save by a few laborers who were engaged in quarrying rock
there, and Morning found no difficulty in purchasing them from their
owners, and removing all the occupants.
On the northern end of the Coronado Beach peninsula, Morning caused to
be erected a laboratory for the manufacture of potentite, with which to
load the steel shells to be carried by the air ship. This new dynamic
force, or, rather, storehouse of force, consisted of a combination of
explosive gelatine with fulminate of mercury, and possessed a power
equal to thirteen hundred tons to the square inch, or sixty times that
of common blasting gunpowder, and nine times that of dynamite, and fifty
pounds of it properly directed would sink any ironclad afloat. It is
quite safe for manipulation, because it is unexplosive, except when
brought in contact with a chemical substance—also non-explosive except
by contact—which is only added immediately before using.
The _Petrel_, the air ship used at the dynamic exposition, was built by
the Mount Carmel Aeronautic Company at their works in Chicago, and sent
by rail in sections to Coronado Beach, where she was put together. She
was cigar-shaped, one hundred feet in length and twenty feet in
diameter, and was built of butternut—the toughest of the light woods.
Her engines, with their fans and propellers, as well as the gas
generator and tank for benzine, were all constructed of tempered
aluminum, made by the new Kentucky process, at a cost of only eight
cents per pound. Being stronger and tougher than the finest steel, and
only one-third the weight of that metal, aluminum was especially adapted
for the construction of air ships.
The machinery of the _Petrel_ was propelled by a gas generated from
benzine. The fluid was carried in an air-tight aluminum tank, from which
it passed, drop by drop, to the generator. This gas, almost as powerful
as the vibratory ether discovered by Mr. Keely, was much safer because
more certainly controlled.
The _Petrel_, with all her machinery in place, with two tons of benzine
in her tanks, and ten men on board of her supplied with sufficient water
and food for use for fifteen days, weighed but ten tons, and the force
generated from two tons of benzine was sufficient to lift her, with a
freight of ten tons more, to a height of five thousand or even ten
thousand feet, and, without any aid from her folding aluminum parachute,
was able to maintain her there for a fortnight, at a speed—in a still
atmosphere—of fifty miles per hour. No balloon was attached to the
_Petrel_, as she relied entirely upon her paddles and wings both for
propulsion and as a means of maintaining herself in the air.
She was constructed upon the principle of aerial navigation furnished by
the wild goose. That bird maintains himself in the ether during a flight
of hundreds of miles without a rest, simply because his strength, or
muscular power, is greater, in proportion to his weight, than that of
creatures who walk upon the ground. Man could always have constructed
wings of silk and bamboo which would have enabled him to fly if he had
only possessed the strength to flap his wings.
Aerial navigation never presented any other problem than that of
procuring power without weight. Once able to obtain the power of a
ten-horse engine, with a weight, including machinery, of less than one
ton, one might fly all over the world, and, by taking advantage of the
air currents, a knowledge of which will soon be gained, fly at a speed
of fifty or even one hundred miles an hour. The recent discovery of the
immense power of a gas which it is possible to generate from benzine
without the use of fuel, has made the air as available for the purposes
of rapid transit by man as the ocean or the land. The great cost of
locomotion by this means will doubtless prevent its use for the
transportation of freight, or, indeed, of passengers, except for those
who can afford the luxury, and for them it will supplant all other
methods.
The _Petrel_ was provided with the new patent condensed fuel, one pound
of which for cooking and heating purposes is equal to ten pounds of
coal. She was furnished with parachutes made of thin sheets of aluminum
closely folded one above the other. These, when not in use, formed an
awning or canopy over her deck, while, in case of accident, they could,
by pulling a convenient lever, be instantly spread over an area large
enough to insure her a gradual and safe descent, and should such descent
be into the water, she was so constructed as to float as buoyantly as a
cork upon its surface, while, by lessening the number of revolutions per
minute of her aluminum propellers, they could be used as paddles for her
propulsion through the water.
The freight of the _Petrel_ consisted of two hundred shells of
potentite, weighing one hundred pounds each, and the result to the
Coronodo Islands of their falling upon it from a height of a mile or
more, was predicted long in advance of the experiment. “If,” it was
said, “fifty pounds of this explosive will destroy an ironclad, what
will twenty thousand pounds of it do to an island of rock? What would a
dozen _Petrels_ accomplish, hurling two hundred and forty thousand
pounds of it upon an army, a city, or an enemy’s fortress?”
They could level Gibraltar with the sea; they could extirpate an army of
a million men; they could obliterate London or Berlin or New York from
the face of the earth. A fleet of a hundred _Petrels_ could ascend from
New York, cross the Atlantic in three days, destroy every city in the
United Kingdom in six hours, and, leaving England a mass of ruins, with
two-thirds of her people slain, return in three days to New York, with
unused power enough to go to San Francisco and back without descending.
England, or any other nation, could likewise destroy America, for
neither aerial navigation nor the manufacture of potentite are secrets
locked in any one man’s brain.
“If Mr. Morning’s dynamic exposition,” it was said, “shall fulfill its
promise, he can, if he chooses, as the possessor of so complete an air
ship and so powerful an explosive, be the ruler of the world. Emperors
and Parliaments must, for the time, be the subjects of the man who can
destroy cities and camps, and who can make such changes in the map of
the world as he may choose.”
“If the experiment this day to be made at Coronado,” said the President
of the United States, “shall be successful, armies may as well be
disbanded, for there can be no more war, and governments all over the
world must, henceforth, rest upon the consent of the governed.”
Before sending the _Petrel_ upon her mission, an examination of the
territory to be devastated was in order, and the Hotel del Coronado was
nearly emptied of its guests, for the _Charleston_, the _Warspite_, and
the _Wilhelm II._, steamed away to the Coronado Islands, where the
American, British, German, French, Russian, Italian, Mexican, and
Brazilian engineers, with their assistants, landed, took measurements
and altitudes, and a number of photographic views, and examined the
islands thoroughly, verifying the accuracy of the topographical maps and
profile models in clay previously made by engineers employed by Morning.
It was projected to make another survey and set of maps after the
potentite had done its work, so as to preserve an accurate and
unimpeachable record of the result of what our hero modestly called his
“experiment.”
The vessels returned to their moorings about three o’clock in the
afternoon of the first day of the exposition, in ample time for their
passengers and officers to attend the dinner given by Morning that
evening to his royal and imperial majesty Edward the Seventh, king of
Great Britain and emperor of India. This sagacious prince, rightly
conceiving that the dynamic exposition of citizen David Morning was
likely to be the preliminary of an entire change in the methods of
government, if not in the governments themselves, of the civilized
world, determined to head in person the British delegation, which was
brought on the _Warspite_ from Vancouver to San Diego.
The manner in which King Edward has impressed the American people may be
deduced from a remark made at the dinner by a shrewd observer and
leading citizen of San Diego.
“That king,” said he, “is a dandy. He is credited with being the
cleverest and most adroit politician in England, and I believe it, or he
could never have steered his canoe out of that baccarat whirlpool. If
Dave Morning’s dynamics should sort of blow him out of a job at home,
let him come over here, and in one year I will back him at long odds to
get the nomination for the best office in the county from either the
Democratic or Republican convention, and, maybe, from both. What a
roaring team he and Jack Dodge and Sam Davis would make for a county
canvass! Jack to do the fiddling and dancing, Sam the all-around lying,
and Edward the hand shaking and the setting ’em up for the boys!”
The ample gardens of San Diego, San Bernardino, Los Angeles, and Santa
Barbara were stripped for the decoration of the banquet hall. All day
flowers were arriving by the train load, and several hundred floral
artists were at work in the great dining room. The effect was
surpassingly beautiful. Suspended from the great dome by ropes of smilax
was a gigantic figure of Peace, wrought in white calla lilies, bearing
in her right hand a branch from an olive tree, while her left held to
her lips a trumpet of yellow jasmine. On the walls the arms of all
nations were wrought in camellias, carnations, fleur-de-lis, and roses
of every hue. The music and the menu were both incomparable, and, in
accordance with the later and better practice of great dinners, formal
speech making was altogether dispensed with.
The next morning the shores of Coronado Beach were black with people,
and in the great hotel every piazza and window facing southward or
westward was occupied. There was a light breeze blowing from the north
as the _Petrel_ left her berth and rapidly mounted in the air to a
height of seven thousand feet, which altitude she achieved with her fans
in seven minutes’ time. She then put her propellers in motion and was
soon a mere speck against the cloudless sky, scarcely discernible by the
most powerful glasses.
But though out of sight she soon made her existence and her work known
to the multitude. In thirty-five minutes from the time she left her
berth, she had compassed a mile and a half in height and sixteen miles
of distance and was hovering over Coronado Islands. In twenty minutes
more six men on board of her had thrown over the two hundred potentite
shells, and in half an hour thereafter the aerial wonder was again
resting quietly on the peninsula.
It was a clear day, and the islands were distinctly visible. Sight
travels more swiftly than sound, and before any noise was heard, the
immense mass of rock, crown shaped, from which the islands take their
name, was seen by the gazers on the beach to leap from its place and
fall into the sea. Other masses in swift succession followed; then came
roars of sound, as if heaven and earth were coming together; roars of
sound which rattled the doors and casements of the hotel as if shaken
with a high wind. For twenty minutes this awe-inspiring exhibition
continued, and when the tremendous cannonading ceased, the Coronada
Islands—in the form in which they had previously existed—were no more.
The work of resurveying and making new topographical maps was
subsequently performed, as a part of the duty of those connected with
the dynamic exposition, but it needed no measurements to demonstrate the
awful power of the potentite. An area of solid rock a mile square was
rent into fragments for a depth of one hundred feet.
Many improvements in machinery and management were suggested to the
officers of the _Petrel_, but the experiment was conceded by all the
great engineers who witnessed it, to be so completely successful as to
practically eliminate land warfare from the future of nations.
“It is fortunate,” said the Marquis of Salisbury, who was one of the
British delegation—“it is fortunate that the manufacture of even a small
quantity of potentite requires months of time, great skill, and a costly
and extensive laboratory, so that it will be not impracticable to
prevent its preparation by private persons. But given a piece of land
anywhere in the civilized world large enough to permit of the building
of air ships and the manufacture of potentite, and sufficiently defended
to afford to its garrison three months’ time in which to perfect the
making of that explosive, and any power, however insignificant, could,
with a hundred air ships, destroy in three days all the great cities in
Europe.”
“As it now appears,” continued the Marquis, “this method of warfare
would not be so available against a moving object on the sea, such as a
war ship. But if the submarine torpedo boat, whose operations we are to
witness to-morrow, shall be anything nearly as effective as Mr.
Morning’s air ship, it seems to me that a convention of civilized powers
to adjust international relations and provide for a Congress and Court
of Nations, to which all international differences must be submitted,
will be an absolute necessity in the future,”
“And how would the decrees of such a court be enforced, your lordship,”
inquired Prince Bismarck, who was listening.
“By the only aerial war vessels equipped with potentite which the allied
nations would suffer to exist, your highness, and which vessels would be
subject to the orders of the Court of Nations. If any nation refused to
obey such decree, it could be disciplined, and if any nation attempted
to put a potentite air ship under way, it would be necessary, in
self-defense, for the allied powers, after adequate warning, to
extirpate the offending parties.”
“Might not a potentite air ship be secretly fitted out, your lordship?”
asked the prince.
“Hardly,” replied the Marquis, “for, with the aid of a corps of
observation air ships, and of international detectives in every center
of population, the world, both savage and civilized, could be adequately
policed at a very small cost.”
“And what, in your lordship’s opinion, will be the condition in or
before the Congress of Nations, of a people who desire separate
government and who have been unable to obtain it?” said Mr. Michael
Davitt, who was standing by.
The Marquis looked the Irishman squarely in the eye and replied slowly:
“I think it will be quite out of the power of any government to retain
by force under its rule any considerable number of people, who, with or
without, a grievance, are practically unanimous for a separate
government. The Congress of Nations will, or at least ought to, require
that any people seeking separation shall be nearly unanimous. But do you
think, Mr. Davitt, to be candid, that the people of Ulster and the
people of Galway would ever be brought to agree to any proposition on
earth?”
“Begorra, your lordship, if you don’t mind me takin’ the answer to your
question out of the mouth of Misther Davitt,” said the Honorable Bellew
McCafferty, Home Rule member from Mayo—“begorra, there’s one great
principle upon which Oireland is, and ever will be, united. Catholic and
Protestant, Fardowner and Corkonian, Priest and Peeler are all heart and
soul agreed”—
“To do what?” queried his lordship.
“Never,” replied the McCafferty, “never to pay any rint.”