Probably few people have been more successful in the discovering line
than Christopher Columbus. Living as he did in a day when a great many
things were still in an undiscovered state, the horizon was filled with
golden opportunities for a man possessed of Mr. C.'s pluck and ambition.
His life at first was filled with rebuffs and disappointments, but at
last he grew to be a man of importance in his own profession, and the
people who wanted anything discovered would always bring it to him
rather than take it elsewhere.
And yet the life of Columbus was a stormy one. Though he discovered a
continent wherein a millionaire attracts no attention, he himself was
very poor.
Though he rescued from barbarism a broad and beautiful land in whose
metropolis the theft of less than half a million of dollars is regarded
as petty larceny, Chris himself often went to bed hungry. Is it not
singular that the gray-eyed and gentle Columbus should have added a
hemisphere to the history of our globe, a hemisphere, too, where pie
is a common thing, not only on Sunday, but throughout the week, and yet
that he should have gone down to his grave pieless!
Such is the history of progress in all ages and in all lines of thought
and investigation. Such is the meagre reward of the pioneer in new
fields of action.
I presume that America today has a larger pie area than any other
land in which the Cockney English language is spoken. Right here where
millions of native born Americans dwell, many of whom are ashamed of the
fact that they were born here and which shame is entirely mutual between
the Goddess of Liberty and themselves, we have a style of pie that no
other land can boast of.
From the bleak and acid dried apple pie of Maine to the irrigated
mince pie of the blue Pacific, all along down the long line of igneous,
volcanic and stratified pie, America, the land of the freedom bird with
the high instep to his nose, leads the world.
Other lands may point with undissembled pride to their polygamy and
their cholera, but we reck not. Our polygamy here is still in its
infancy and our leprosy has had the disadvantage of a cold, backward
spring, but look at our pie.
Throughout a long and disastrous war, sometimes referred to as a
fraticidal war, during which this fair land was drenched in blood, and
also during which aforesaid war numerous frightful blunders were
made which are fast coming to the surface--through the courtesy of
participants in said war who have patiently waited for those who
blundered to die off, and now admit that said participants who are dead
did blunder exceedingly throughout all this long and deadly struggle for
the supremacy of liberty and right--as I was about to say when my mind
began to wobble, the American pie has shown forth resplendent in the
full glare of a noonday sun or beneath the pale-green of the electric
light, and she stands forth proudly today with her undying loyalty to
dyspepsia untrammeled and her deep and deadly gastric antipathy still
fiercely burning in her breast.
That is the proud history of American pie. Powers, principalities,
kingdoms and handmade dynasties may crumble, but the republican form of
pie does not crumble. Tyranny may totter on its throne, but the American
pie does not totter. Not a tot. No foreign threat has ever been able
to make our common chicken pie quail. I do not say this because it is
smart; I simply say it to fill up.
But would it not do Columbus good to come among us today and look
over our free institutions? Would it not please him to ride over this
continent which has been rescued by his presence of mind from the
thraldom of barbarism and forked over to the genial and refining
influences of prohibition and pie?
America fills no mean niche in the great history of nations, and if you
listen carefully for a few moments you will hear some American, with his
mouth full of pie, make that remark. The American is always frank and
perfectly free to state that no other country can approach this one. We
allow no little two-for-a-quarter monarchy to excel us in the size of
our failures or in the calm and self-poised deliberation with which
we erect a monument to the glory of a worthy citizen who is dead, and
therefore politically useless.
The careless student of the career of Columbus will find much in these
lines that he has not yet seen. He will realize when he comes to read
this little sketch the pains and the trouble and the research necessary
before such an article on the life and work of Columbus could be
written, and he will thank me for it; but it not for that that I have
done it. It is a pleasure for me to hunt up and arrange historical and
biographical data in a pleasing form for the student and savant. I am
only too glad to please and gratify the student and the savant. I was
that way myself once and I know how to sympathize with them.
P. S.--I neglected to state that Columbus was a married man. Still, he
did not murmur or repine.