Like hope, the passion for prophecy springs eternal in the human
breast; man is prone to it, as the sparks fly upward. Stripped of
its several disguises, a considerable part of the world’s writing
and speaking is pure prediction; even the official forecaster of
the weather bureau can not resist the universal urge and maintain a
discreet and dignified silence befitting his office. Eliminate from
politics, for example, all prophecies, expressed or implied—all the
jeremiads based on assumption of the opposite party’s success and all
the assurances of a golden age to ensue from its defeat—and politics
will “look another thing.”
But of all the cloud of witnesses to the kind of mountain which the
mouse of our country’s future is to bring forth, none seems clearly
to discern the adverse conditions environing the American prophet and
foredooming to futility his vision and his dream. None appears to take
account of the annulling fact that this continent is turning over like
a man in bed; yet it ought to be obvious to the meanest understanding
that if this movement continue it will supply conditions suitable
to neither the reign of terror consequent upon the success of one’s
political opponents nor the golden age dependent on the ascendency of
the principles professed by oneself.
It has been shown that the Farallon islands, just off the Pacific
coast, are becoming, as Tennyson would put it, “more and more;” the
lighthouse keeper out there is in progressive achievement of the rôle
of “prominent citizen.” The bar at the mouth of San Francisco harbor is
rising faster in fathoms than those farther inland in public esteem. In
the steady ascension of the bottom of the bay lurks a possibility which
without vanity we may affirm will astonish the astronomers of Mars. In
short, the entire Pacific Coast is insurgent.
On the Atlantic seaboard inundations from marine storms occur every
year. The waves eat farther and farther into the land; the high-water
mark of one decade becomes the low-water mark of the next, and diking
as an agricultural method has a growing importance. It is estimated
that the greater part of Manhattan island will be submerged within
fifty years, and that within an even shorter period the Jersey
mosquito will find no rest for the sole of his foot, and must become a
pelican or quit.
But the steady subsidence of the Atlantic littoral foreshadows changes
more startling than these—more startling, at least, to some who have
not the advantage to be Jersey mosquitoes. Man himself, the man of the
Eastern states, _Homo smugwumpus_, will find himself face to face with
a problem of supreme scientific interest and personal importance. Will
he travel west and go up with the country, or, staying where he is,
develop into a fish and be mighty quick about it? The ordinary process
of evolution, whereby a million years are required to change a red
worm into a rhinoceros or advance a cave-bat one step in biological
preferment and make it a theologian, will not do for _H. smugwumpus_
when the wave is at his armpits and his ancestral acres are falling
away from his webless feet. Even the fittest of his species must travel
with uncommon speed along the line of development in order to survive
in the new environment. They must slide nimbly up the scale of being,
passing every intermediate stage between smugwumphood and fishness
without pausing to enjoy its advantages. Probably, however, most of
them will prefer to ascend the new watercourses up the ever-steepening
slope of the great plains, settling eventually on the summit of the
continent, roundabout San Francisco—where it is to be hoped they will
be welcome if they behave themselves. Doubtless they will miss many of
the blessings of their lowland existence, but they will find in the
superior altitude an immunity from sunstroke and the mad dog, which
will be partial compensation for renouncing the fascinating study of
the long thermometer.
Probably the turning over of the continent will in time be stayed; to
the unscientific mind, at least, its complete subversion is imperfectly
thinkable. But for the next few thousand years, while still the memory
of the purpose and efficacy of Noah’s deluge is fresh and pleasing in
Heaven, the movement will be likely to continue. By the time that it
ceases the Atlantic shore will perhaps be a contour line on the eastern
declivity of the Rocky Mountains, and the Pacific slope comprise all
that region now underlying the “great gulf” between this world and
Hawaii. As a practical settlement of the annexation question on a
staying basis, this unpolitical movement is worthy of the highest
commendation. With the construction of the San Francisco and Honolulu
Pacific Railroad by Government and at the rate of fifty million dollars
a mile in hand paid to the owners of the road, and by them kept for
their honesty, the status of the descendants of Kamehameha and Kalakaua
will be definitely fixed—they will be payers of All That The Traffic
Will Bear.
The upward tendency of the Pacific side of the continent will be
attended, no doubt, with certain inconveniences. Already the relentless
progress of its ascension has laid “effacing fingers” on the _amour
propre_ of several worthy persons who thought themselves heavy enough
to hold it down.
1892.