Ohio History Journal

178       Ohio Arch. and His. Society Publications.  [VOL. 3

 

 

MIGRATIONS AND THEIR LESSONS.

 

SERMON PREACHED IN THE OPERA HOUSE, SUNDAY, BY WASHINGTON

GLADDEN, OF COLUMBUS.

By faith, Abraham, when he was called, obeyed to go out unto a place

which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing

whither he went.-Heb. ix, 8.

This is the first notice in ancient records of that great

movement westward which occupies so many chapters of the

history of the human race. From that unknown country named

Ur of the Chaldees, Terah, the father of Abraham, had already

journeyed westward, bringing his household to Haran; here

they tarried for a little, and here it was that Abraham heard the

divine call and went forth to the land of Canaan. A mighty

river, the Euphrates, rolled between him and his destination;

two days' journey brought him to its banks. Nothing daunted,

he made his way across, perhaps at that point where the great

river is still forded; and when he had gained the other shore he

had won his cognomen of "Hebrew"-the man who had

crossed. Weary days of desert journeying were yet before him,

but the divine voice was still calling him, and he pushed steadily

forward, halting for a little in the bright valley of Damascus,

but resting not till his tent was pitched at Bethel, and he looked

abroad from the hill tops upon the fertile plains and smiling val-

leys of the land that was to be his inheritance, and where that

great nation which should spring from his loins was to have its

seat.

Abraham's migration was undertaken for a different reason

and with a higher purpose than that of many of his contempor-

aries and successors; nevertheless he was moved with the cur-

rent. Where that Semitic race to which he belonged had its

origin may not be clearly known. We find it first in the lower

valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris, whence, moving north-

westward and southwestward, it populated Babylonia, Syria,

Phoenicia and the rest of Canaan. Even the ancient Egyptians

were not an autochthonic race. Their features, their languages

link them with Asia rather than with Africa. They, too, were a

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people who had come in the early dawn of prehistoric times

from the East.

Those successive migrations of our own Aryan tribes from

their nest in Asia westward over Europe I need only stop to

mention. From the remotest antiquity we see these people

moving in vast masses toward the setting sun, one column fol-

lowing another at intervals of time which no monuments or

memorials seem to mark; the Hellenic and the Latin groups

flooding the Mediterranean peninsulas, and pausing before the

mighty barrier of the Alps; the Kelts, the Teutons, the Slavs,

moving northwestward in their order, expelling the Aborigines,

and, in time, subjugating one another. It would seem that the

configuration of the northern temperate zone of the Eastern

Continent was favorable to such movements; for the vast cen-

tral plains of Eastern Asia are prolonged westward through

Russia, Northern Germany and Holland; and a man can walk,

says one authority, from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean, across

Asia and Europe, without encountering any elevation of more

than a few hundred feet, or any stream which it is difficult to

ford. But when these Aryan peoples had poured their floods

for uncounted centuries over Europe, which was their Promised

Land; when they had overspread its plains and possessed them-

selves of its substance, they found themselves standing on the

shores of a trackless ocean, whose billows, breaking at their feet

in endless mockery, flung back to the rushing tide of humanity

their challenge: " Thus far shalt thou come and no farther, and

here shall thy proud waves be stayed."

For many centuries this watery barrier restrained them.

From the Cantabrian mountain tops, from the low-lying shores

of Brittany, from the rocky coast of Cornwall, or the green hills

of Ireland, they looked away to the westward wondering and

longing. What lands might lie beneath that misty horizon?

Was it true, indeed, that

 

"Sweet fields beyond this swelling flood

[Stood] drest in living green?"

Who should dare to sail forth unto that No Man's Land and

ravish its secret from the unchartered ocean? It was well that

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they waited. Art had time to germinate and fructify, civilization

had room to expand and ripen; in all these European lands,

races were in training for the task of subduing another continent.

In the fullness of time, the word that Abraham heard was

spoken again, and the brave Genoese sailor turned the prows of

his little ships toward the setting sun, and sailed away, not

knowing whither he went, but greatly hoping to find beyond the

sea a land which he should receive for an inheritance. How

steadily, during the four centuries that have elapsed since Colum-

bus landed on our western coast, the tide of migration has

flowed hitherward, I need not spend any time in showing. There

may be, at this time, one hundred of millions of people upon

this Western Continent, in North and South America; of these,

probably not more than ten millions are natives of the soil; ninety

millions are the dsscendants of men who came across the sea.

Of these ninety millions, eight or nine millions are the offspring

of those who came, much against their will, in the holds of

slave ships, victims of the cruelty and cupidity of the stronger

race; and there are a few hundred thousand Semites, the

descendants of Abraham whose Promised Land, far away in the

heart of the other continent, was the first stage of this secular

progress; but the great mass of these inhabitants of the New

World belong to that Aryan race, whose teeming millions have

been hurrying westward ever since the dawn of time. From

the mountain slopes and broad plateaus of Central Asia-from

the cradle of the human race-these eager, adventurous throngs

have come. Past the snowy heights of the Himalayas, over the

ridge of the Ural Mountains, across the steppes of Tartary, and

along the shores of the Caspian and the Black Seas, they have

thronged into Germany and France and Spain and England and

Scandinavia; here, dividing into tribes, each with a tongue of

its own (though all these tongues are kindred), here tilling fields,

sinking mines, building cities, and hence, on the wings of the

wind and the vapor, flying over the sea to this Western Conti-

nent, to rear on this fresh soil, as we hope and trust, a nobler

fabric of social order than any they have left behind.

And here, too, the power that brought them still compels

them. The Pilgrims were scarcely landed on the New England

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coast when they began to push their way out westward into the

interior. Within twenty years after the Mayflower anchored in

Plymouth harbor, there were several prosperous settlements on

the Connecticut river, a hundred miles inland, though the

savages resisted the advance at every step, and every town was

stockaded for defense against the midnight foe. And ever since

that day the tide of emigration has been flowing steadily west-

ward-westward-over the Appalachian range, down the valley

of the Ohio, along the borders of the Great Lakes, across the

teeming prairies, over the Rockies and the Sierras to the western

shore. That mighty movement of the people westward, west-

ward, which began long before Abraham took up his journey

from Haran toward Canaan, has been going on ever since; all

the greatest nations of the earth have taken part in it; in the

path of this movement have arisen all the splendid monuments

of civilization; our own highways are trembling yet with the

tread of its triumphant host.

Is not this phenomenon worth looking at, soberly, for a little

while this afternoon ? May we not safely infer that a process of

this nature, stretching through untold centuries, covering two

continents, spanning one stormy ocean, enlisting more or less

directly all the great nations of modern history, is a process with

which Providence has something to do? One need not be a very

strong Calvinist to believe that such vast on - goings as these are

provided for in the plans of an omniscient Ruler.

What are the causes of this great movement of the peoples?

They are many and various. The forces which impel families

and tribes to go forth from their country and their kindred unto

lands more or less dimly shown them in prophetic vision are of

many kinds, and operate in diverse ways. Not seldom the great

law of population operates to produce these movements of the

people.  Population, according to the Malthusian statement,

always tends to increase more rapidly than subsistence; hunger

drives forth hordes of men to seek a livelihood in fresh fields and

pastures new. This law operates even where the population is

sparse and the resources of nature not at all developed.  The

southward movements of the Gothic tribes upon the cultivated

lands of Southern Europe may have been due in part to this

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cause. The lands they left behind were by no means exhausted

by cultivation, but they depended mainly on pasturage, and

therefore needed far more land than modern agricultural people.

Many of the movements of the Aborigines upon our own soil

may have been produced by this cause. When the game had

disappeared from its territory the tribe must move on to unoccu-

pied lands. Indeed, the less civilized the people, the greater the

need of frequent migration. Two or three acres will support a

skillful farmer or gardener; the primeval hunter and fisherman

cannot live on less than two or three thousand acres. And we

may well suppose that the population on the central steppes of

Asia, growing faster than their subsistence grew, were thrust out

of their nests, in larger and smaller numbers, and started on their

westward journeyings. The pressure of population upon sub-

sistence being relieved by each exodus, the tribes left behind

multiplied faster than ever, and soon a new swarm was ready to

go forth from the hive.

In our own time, great movements of population have been

due to the failure of the means of subsistence. The Irish famine

of 1846-7 started a tidal wave of emigration to this country, and

the current thus set in motion has been kept flowing by other

causes. And while the great emigrations of modern years toward

this hemisphere have not generally been due to famine or starva-

tion in the old countries, they have resulted in considerable part

from the over-crowdings of those countries, and from the expec-

tation, on the part of the emigrants, of finding larger wages,

ampler opportunities and better prospects for themselves and

their children in this land than in the homeland.

Other causes have constantly been operating. Wars of con-

quest and ambition, and the burdens caused by war, drive many

of the sons of peace forth from their homes to seek residence in

more pacific countries. The militarism of Germany explains

the presence on our soil of hundreds of thousands of the German

people. Political oppression, the domination of privileged classes,

the tyranny of priests and hierarchs hasten the departure from

lands that they love of those to whom liberty is dear. The Pil-

grims of Plymouth, the Roman Catholics of Baltimore were fugi-

tives from ecclesiastical persecutions.  Sometimes these emi-

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Migrations and Their Lessons.            183

 

grants have been social or political idealists with plans for the

reorganization of society to which their native land was not hos-

pitable; and they have sought upon virgin soil a free area for the

development of their ideas. Cabet and his Icarians, Owen and

his New Harmonists, were the leaders of colonies in the interest

of new social schemes.

To all these forces of propulsion by which men have been

driven from their ancestral seats must be added those forces of

attraction by which they have been drawn toward the new coun-

tries. Discoveries of mines of the precious metals, of soils of

phenomenal fertility, of climates serene and delectable, have been

reported to them, and they have been tempted by the prospects

of unwonted gains and enjoyments to separate themselves from

kindred and companions to set up their habitations in distant

lands.

Nor will the external motives-whether of propulsion or of

attraction-account for all these movements. There are powers

within their own breasts that start men upon these journeys.

A native restlessness, a love of novelty, a passion for adventure,

account for many of them. There are men who never could

be quiet long in Paradise; it would take a battalion of angels

with flaming swords to keep them within its bright enclosures.

There are men to whom the order and restraint of civilized

society are irksome; they would rather rove through forests

than travel in highways; they prefer the freedom of the woods

which is the barrenest and poorest sort of freedom, to the free-

dom of the city, which, when its laws are most firmly enforced,

is the completest and most perfect liberty. Such unbridled

spirits are always found in the frontier lines of emigration.

Thus we see how many and varied are the ascertained

forces by which these great tides of population are controlled,

but I think we must add to these another and far more subtle

force-that divine impulse by which all the greater movements

of history must be explained. For while it is true that hunger

and fear, and the love of life, and the love of liberty, and the

love of change, and the impatience of restraint and the greed

of gold, and the ambition to found new empires, and a thousand

other motives have acted upon the minds of men urging them

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into these currents of emigration, yet all over these conflicting

motives, harmonizing them all and bringing order out of them,

is the plan of the all-wise Ruler of the world, who makes the

wrath and the folly and the greed of man to praise him, and

restrains the remainder thereof.

The greatest fact in all these world movements is that they

are fulfilling a design that is more comprehensive and farther-

reaching than wisdom of man could conceive. Those Aryan

peoples, when they started on their journeys from Eastern

Asia, had no more conception of the splendid European and

American civilizations which they were going forth to build,

than the iron ore in the mountain has of the mighty genie

of fire and steam, fashioned from its substance, which will soon

be ploughing the Atlantic main; any more than the spring at the

farthest sources of the Amazon has of the majestic river into

which its tiny fount will grow. This movement westward, ever

westward, was all unconscious. They had some small and dim

purpose of their own, but the great purpose of God they knew

nothing about. There was an instinct, partly human, that

impelled them; but of the divine leadings they were wholly

oblivious. They went forth, not knowing very well whither

they went, not knowing at all why they went. It would have

been very difficult for any careful student of human welfare,

contemplating the whole problem with such light as he could

get, to justify their going. In these later years the case is

greatly altered; a large share of the immigrants who cross from

the old world to the new speedily better their condition; but in

the earlier years this was not the rule. Most of those who then

went forth in search of new homes received, during their life-

time, no adequate reward for their risks and their labors. If you

had measured what they lost and what they suffered against

what they gained and what they enjoyed, the balance, so far as

worldly comfort is concerned, would have been on the wrong

side. They sought, no doubt, to escape from penury and dis-

comfort, and restraint; but they encountered hardships, labors,

miseries, worse than those from which they fled. Half of the

Pilgrims who landed on Plymouth Rock in December were in

their graves before the violets ever bloomed again upon that

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Migrations and Their Lessons.            185

 

sterile coast. The case with the majority of our early emigrants

and pioneers was not much better. Of one hundred and five

colonists in Virginia in June, 1607, sixty-seven had died before

the next year was ten days old. The winter of 1609 began with

four hundred and ninety persons in that colony and ended with

sixty. Surely this was not a profitable speculation, from the

point of view of individual interest. If it is the highest wisdom

of a man to look out for his own individual interest, these men

were not wise. If they acted upon a calculation of personal

gains and losses, it was a bad calculation. Europe and America

would have been peopled and developed by the Aryan races far

less slowly than they were, if these movements of population

had been guided by prudential and economical considerations.

No! these movements of population were very largely in-

stinctive rather than rational; spontaneous rather than delib-

erate; prophetic more than economic. Sometimes, no doubt,

the chances were calculated and miscalculated owing to defective

knowledge of the facts. The reports which reached the old

countries were not always accurate. Travelers were sometimes

enthusiastic; land speculators were sometimes unscrupulous;

men were beguiled into enterprises which they would never have

undertaken if they had known what perils and what toils were

before them. But most often they were only too eager to believe

the glowing tales that were told them; they were more than half

to blame for the deceit which was practiced on them; they took

but little pains to find out the facts before they set out. The

movement was not rational. It was instinctive.   It was the

fruit of that world-compelling plan by which nations and tribes

and peoples are driven forward in the ways of destiny.

Do we mean, then, to say that Providence decreed all the

sufferings and losses and discomforts of these westward-moving

hosts? That Providence impelled them to enter paths that led

to hardship and famine and disaster? No, I do not dogmatize

about the designs of Providence; how much suffering He has

decreed I will not undertake to say; but it is evident that He

has appointed for men a destiny from which suffering is never

absent, and that the paths which conduct to His most glorious

gifts are paths which lead through toil and trial. The Captain

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of our salvation was made perfect through suffering, and where

the Captain leads His followers must go. And I think that we

can discover, as we study these world-movements, some of those

deep things of God concerning whose meaning it is not wise to

be too confident, but whose manifestations, so far as they come

within the range of our own understanding, are full of stimu-

lating suggestion.

It is evident, to begin with, that these migrations of the

nations furnish a field for the culture of all the more robust vir-

tues. I do not mean to assert that pioneers and emigrants, as a

class, are in these days, or ever were, in all respects exemplary.

They are often persons of coarse fiber and reckless temper; they

are for a time, in the earlier period, beyond the restraint of laws

and social conventions; sometimes they become lawless and

vicious in the extreme. Nevertheless it is certain that many of

those groups who came to America in the last two centuries

brought their moral standards and their social conscience with

them, and established upon these shores a purer type of society

than they had left behind. But all these, whether they be stiff

Puritans or free-living Cavaliers, have need of cultivating and

manifesting the great virtues of courage, of endurance, of self-

sacrifice; to face danger calmly, to bear hardships quietly, to

meet death serenely--these are indispensable qualities in the

pioneer. No such opportunities of heroism come to us. There

are chances enough even for us to be heroic, but they are not

like these. These hand-to-hand encounters with savages and

wild beasts; these fights with frost and flood and pale-faced

famine; these measurings and weighings of the hoarded ears of

maize to make them last till harvest; these lonely marches and

bivouacs in the primeval forest; these persistent struggles with

the fierce wilderness to subjugate its soil - all these are the very

alphabet of heroism for future generations.

Close akin to the pioneer's courage is his faith in the future.

It takes a high order of faith to discern the beauty and bounty of

the ages to come and to be willing to live for them and die with-

out seeing them.   I do not mean to assert that all these pio-

neers have possessed this heroic faith, but that it has lived in the

breasts of many of them their own words bear witness. In the

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Migrations and Their Lessons.          187

 

ancient records of the Plymouth Pilgrims we read that one rea-

son, and not the least reason, of their removal to America was

"a great hope and inward zeal they had of laying some good

foundation, or at least to make some way thereunto, for the

propagating and advancement of the Gospel of the Kingdom of

Christ in those remote parts of the world, yea, although they

should be but as stepping stones unto others for the performance

of so great a work." Very few, indeed, of the great army of

pioneers have had any reasonable expectation of enjoying in

their own lifetime the fruits of their own labors. Abraham went

out from Haran to Canaan in hope that the land would some day

belong to his descendants; yet, as Stephen in his speech before the

Sanhedrim so strongly said, "God gave him none inheritance in it;

no, not so much as to set his foot on, and He promised to give it

to him in possession, and to his seed after him, when as yet he

had no child; but God spake on this wise, that his seed should

sojourn in a strange land, and that they should bring them unto

bondage and entreat them evil four hundred years; but the na-

tion to which they shall be in bondage will I judge, saith God;

after that shall they come forth and serve me in this place."

After the call to Abraham, in Haran, and the migration of Abra-

ham to Canaan, there were to be hundreds of weary years-

years of nomadic life in Palestine, years of famine, of bondage,

of wandering in the wilderness-before his descendants should

gain full possession of the promised land; but there was the

promise, and Abraham believed the promise and imparted his

own great faith to his children and his children's children, and

this faith never failed them; it upheld them under all the hard-

ships of the Egyptian slavery, and it brought them back, cen-

turies later, to the land which had been promised to their father,

Abraham. This is, no doubt, the most striking instance in his-

tory of the faith of a pioneer and of its influence upon the life

of generations following; but something not unlike it is wit-

nessed in the conduct of many of those who have laid the foun-

dations of great States in toil and tears, hoping that those who

should come after them would reap the fruit of their sowing,

and through their sacrifices enter into security and peace.

And this brings us to one more great motive which the

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migration of nations emphasizes and reveals-the motive which

springs from the solidarity of races; which leads a man to feel

that he is a partner, not only with his coevals, but with his fore-

bears and his posterity; that much of the best part of his gains

and his joys comes from the labors of those who have gone be-

fore him, and much of his most fruitful work must be done for

the benefit of those who shall come after him.

It is when man rises to this height of vision, and sees the

generations all linked together for weal or woe, helpers of one

another's welfare, sharers of one another's misfortune, that he

becomes worthy of that word which defines him as a being of

large discourse, looking before and after. All the greater

motives of our work spring from the realization of these sublime

facts; from our sense of gratitude to those who have gone before

us, and our sense of obligation to those who are coming after us.

These are the truths which are brought home with power to our

minds as we look back upon the lives of our forerunners, and

which, beyond a doubt, were present in the minds of many of

them as they laid the foundations whereon to-day we build.

Such, then, are some of the gains that spring from these

great migrations; they furnish a field for the development of the

robust virtues, they provide a discipline for faith, they strengthen

the bond that binds together the generation.

The connection of these thoughts with this occasion is not,

I trust, obscure. I have not thought it any part of my duty at

this time to undertake the recital of the annals of the colony

that landed on this spot one hundred years ago. That task has

been entrusted to other and more capable hands. It seemed

more fitting that I should rather attempt to connect the found-

ing of this colony with the great historic movement of which it

was a part, that we might discern something of the sweep and

significance of that movement. With how many of these great

purposes of Providence which we have been studying these

colonists consciously connected themselves I do not know;

certain it is that they had a great opportunity of illustrating

upon this soil the robust virtues; and I doubt not their faith and

courage are living here in the lines of their descendants. It was

a stormy time in history when they took their departure from

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their native land. On July 14, 1789, the Bastile had fallen, the

first resounding success of the French revolution, the signal of

the destruction of feudal France, and of the coming of a new

regime.

This was more than a political upheaval; it was a social and

economic crisis. France had been cursed and impoverished for

centuries by the most burdensome tyranny; the people were

loaded with debt; agriculture was crushed, trade was crippled,

all industries were paralyzed. The people were striking about

them madly and blindly, caring little who was smitten or what

went down before their wrath, resolute only to make an end of

the existing order. The Bastile was the object of their fury,

but dramatic as its downfall was, it brought no relief from the

present misery. Still the dead hand lay on all the industries of

the nation; still work was scarce and bread was dear though

harvests were abundant, and famine in the midst of plenty

stared the multitude in the face.

"Fair prophesies are spoken," writes Carlyle, "but they

are not fulfilled.  There have been Notables, Assemblages,

turnings-out and comings-in. Intriguing and maneuvering, Par-

limentary eloquence and arguing, Greek meeting Greek, in high

places, has long gone on, yet still bread comes not. The har-

vest is reaped and garnered, yet still we have no bread. Urged

by despair and by hope, what can Drudgery do but rise as pre-

dicted, and produce the General Overturn. Fancy, then, some

Five full-grown millions of such gaunt figures with their hag-

gard faces, in woollen jupes, with copper-studded, leather girths,

and high sabots, starting out to ask, after long unreviewed cen-

turies, virtually this question: How have ye treated us? How

have ye taught us, fed us, and led us, while we toiled for you?

The answer can be read in flames over the nightly summer sky.

This is the feeding and leading we have had of you; EMPTINESS

of pocket, of stomach, of head and of heart. Behold there is

nothing in us; nothing but what Nature gives her wild children

of the desert; Ferocity and Appetite; Strength grounded on

Hunger. Did ye mark among your rights of men that man was

not to die of starvation while there was bread reaped by him?

It is among the Mights of man."

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All over the land, castles are flaming, bands of smugglers

wander unrestrained; "the barriers of towns are burnt, toll

gatherers, tax gatherers, official persons put to flight." And

from all over France hordes of these half-civilized, half-starved,

half-infuriated people are pouring into Paris. Such is the situa-

tion during the Summer and early Autumn of 1789. The

foundations of the great deep of Feudalism are broken up; the

Deluge is at hand. As for the king there is no help for him; he

is too weak a man to deal with such an insurrection. He dallies

with the revolution, tries to ride upon the crest of its advancing

wave, but it skills not; his queen and his court are sullen and

revengeful; there is a banquet at Versailles one night, while

thousands in the great city are starving; and the king's officers

trample under their feet the national cockade, while the queen

looks on applauding, and the people see that the court despises

them and plots to treat their newly gained liberties as it has

treated their emblem. And now the strangest, the most hysteri-

cal of all historic episodes takes place: ten thousand women lead

a howling mob to Versailles, a dozen miles away, followed by

the national guard, with Lafayette at its head, and they capture

the king and queen and bring them to Paris, making them pris-

oners in fact, in their own royal palace of the Tuilleries, and

stamping out the counter revolution with two hundred thousand

hob-nailed shoes. It was an anxious day for Paris; who could

tell what might be coming next? Obviously the reign of the

mob was well begun; those who had everything to lose might as

well convert it into portable securities and silently steal away.

It was on the 6th of October that the king was escorted to Paris

by the shrieking Amazons; before this month had ended tens of

thousands of Frenchmen had bidden good-bye to France. This

was the time of what is known as the second migration-" most

extensive," says Carlyle, "among commons, deputies, noblesse,

clergy, so that to Switzerland alone there go sixty thousand.

One emigration follows another, grounded on reasonable fear,

unreasonable hope, largely, also, on childish pet. The high-

flyers have gone first, now the lower flyers, and even the lower

will go, down to the crawlers."

What has all this to do with our colonists of Gallipolis? I

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Migrations and Their Lessons.          191

 

hardly know how much it has to do with them; but putting this

and that together, it might signify something. For it was right

in the midst of all this panic and terror that there appeared

upon the scene the agents of the Scioto Company, the Yankee,

Joel Barlow, and the Englishman, William Playfair-with their

maps and their prospectuses, and their glowing promises, telling

of a country where the climate was semi-tropical, where the

rivers abound with enormous fish, and the forests with venison;

where the trees exuded sweetmeats, and candles grew on trees;

where there were no taxes to pay and no conscriptions to dread.

Is it any wonder that such a manifesto strongly appealed to the

excited and apprehensive Parisians? Less than a month after

Louis was brought to Paris, and while the alarmed citizens were

flying from France by thousands, Barlow formed his company

of the Scioto, and the emigrants came flocking to his headquar-

ters; five thousand of them were ready to set forth in the early

spring in quest of their Utopia.

It is a pitiful and painful story; I will not dwell upon it.

We can see how several of the motives which we have traced in

our study may have operated to set in motion this migration;

how pinching want, and political oppression, and the horrors of

civil war and social strife made these Frenchmen willing to leave

their native land: and we can see, also, how grievously they were

deceived by the representations made to them, and how great was

their need of courage and faith and patience, and all the heroic

qualities of the pioneer, when they landed on the bluff and took

possession of the log huts that awaited their occupation.

I will not undertake to tell how bravely they met the perils

that surrounded them, nor with how much steadfastness and

fortitude they wrought out their difficult problem. I know that

our hearts go out to them to-day in compassion for their suffer-

ings, and in gratitude for their toils and self-denials; for it is to

them, and to all the noble army of pioneers in whose rank they

marched, and in whose battle with the wilderness they fought

and fell, that we owe the fertile fields, the beautiful homes, the

teeming cities, the wealth and the culture and the power of our

great commonwealth, of our Native Land.

And now, fellow citizens, there remains but one question

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more: What admonition, what incitement comes to us from

this glance across the centuries? We have seen this mighty

march of the peaceful armies of industry around the world,

from east to west; we have counted, as they could not, the cost

of their enterprises; we have learned how much we owe to

them. Can they teach us any thing that we need to know? Do

they summon us to any work which we are prone to neglect?

We honor and applaud their heroism; have we any call to

imitate it? For the physical courage which they displayed there

is not much demand in these piping times of peace; but of the

courage which fears not to confront the enemies of the State,

and the destroyers of our youth, this generation still has need.

It is not with wolves and painted savages that we are called to

fight; but with foes far more dangerous: with robbers of rev-

enues; with pilferers of public funds; with men who make a

trade of politics and are ready always to subordinate the public

welfare to their own ambition; with banditti whose dens are in

the lobbies, and sometimes in the offices of court houses and

city halls, and capitols; yea, with all the purveyors of vice and

crime, with hyenas in human form who get their living by help-

ing their fellow-men on the road to ruin, and whose property in-

creases just in proportion as their neighbors are impoverished

and degraded. To confront such foes takes a different kind of

courage from that which the pioneers exhibited; a courage less

dramatic, less spectacular, less impressive to crude minds; but no

less genuine, or less noble. And there is always room for self-

sacrifice in our encounters with these foes. It generally costs

something, in this world, to secure good government; it costs

something to establish it; it costs something to maintain it.

Hardships, losses, privations untold were endured by those who

laid the foundations of the State, and the State will not be kept

from overthrow unless we are ready to suffer some hardships

and losses in its defense. To challenge and resist the enemies

of the State-to keep its councils pure and its honor stainless-

will require of you and me some sacrifices. We must be will-

ing to face opposition, contempt, contumely; to be called all

manner of hard names; to be stigmatized as cranks, feather-

heads, doctrinaries, dudes; nay, we must even be willing to lose

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Migrations and Their Lessons.           193

 

customers, to see our income reduced, and our prospect of pro-

motion cut off; to suffer the loss of many things rather than be

false to our convictions of duty. Unless this spirit abides in us,

we are unworthy of the liberties which were purchased for us at

so great a cost, and we shall not long retain them.

The faith of the pioneers must also animate our souls.

Unless we believe as they did, that there are better days to

come, our heartless labor will be utterly in vain. If they did

not despair of the future nation, when they held the forlorn

hope here in the wilderness; when half and more than half

their number perished in a single winter; when trackless forests

encircled them, and stubborn soils defied them, and bloody foes

lurked everywhere in ambush for them, surely we should not

despair of the Republic now, when so many fields have been

won, and the forces of intelligence and virtue are so many and

so mighty.

"Amid the storms they sang,

And the stars heard, and the sea,

And the sounding aisles of the dim woods rang

With the anthems of the free."

 

Unless we, their children, in the midst of the foes that be-

league us, can lift up our voices in the same triumphant strain,

we are recreant to the charge they have given us to keep.

Above all, there is need that we should grasp with new con-

viction the great truth of the solidarity of the generations; that

while we confess our obligations to those who lived before us,

we should feel, as we never yet have felt, our duty to those who

will live after us. This is the one clear and strong impression

which such an occasion as this should stamp upon our thought.

To see to it that the treasures of just law and large liberty which

we have inherited shall receive no detriment at our hands, but

shall be handed on unimpaired, unpolluted, undiminished to our

children, this is our supreme obligation. With a great sum have

we obtained this freedom; but the price was not paid by us; we

are the beneficiaries of past generations. We have no right to

waste our patrimony. What cost our fathers such an outlay of

pain and privation we ought to cherish with reverent devotion.

Vol. 111-13

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It is worth all it cost, all and infinitely more, and it must be

transmitted without loss to our successors.

Every thoughtful man admits that the people of one gener-

ation have no right to exhaust the soil from which their suste-

nance is derived, passing it on to their posterity poorer than it

was when they received it. Such wasteful or careless use of

natural resources is criminal. The land, the forests, the mines,

the fish of the streams, all the bounty of nature, are here not

for us alone, but for our children and our children's children for

ages to come. In all our use of these things we must keep them

in mind. Their numbers will increase; the productive energies

of the earth must not be reduced, but reinforced and reinvigor-

ated for their benefit. It is a stupid crime, it is treason against

humanity to impoverish by our greed the soil on which millions

must dwell after we are gone.

If such is our responsibility for the careful and productive

use of natural resources, what shall we say respecting those

higher and more precious portions of our inheritance-the mun-

iments of law, the safeguards of liberty, the wholesome cus-

toms, the sound sentiments, the reverence for God, the respect

for man, the true equality, the genuine fraternity-without

which government is anarchy and society is pandemonium?

Must not these be preserved in their integrity, and transmitted

to those who come after us? These are the talents which the

Lord of the earth entrusts to the people of each generation, and

which they are to deliver up to their successors multiplied and

improved by God's own law of increase. The world that we re-

sign to those who come after us must be a better world than that

which we received from our fathers-a more productive world,

a healthier, happier, safer, purer, freer, nobler world; if we fail

in this, our material gains will only hasten our national decay;

the mighty forces of nature that we have harnessed will but

drag us to destruction; the swift-flying steeds of fire and light-

ning coursing over our land and churning our seas to foam will

speed us to our doom.

Fellow countrymen, fellow Christians, those great currents

of migration from east to west, whose course across the conti-

nent we have followed, are stayed upon our western shore and

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Migrations and Their Lessons.          195

 

can no farther go. For numberless centuries they have been

flowing westward; and the slow tides of time have brought

them to the final barrier. At the Golden Gate, on the snowy

summits of the Cascade Mountains, the pilgrims stand and gaze

afar to that Asian continent from which in the dim twilight of

history their father set forth-to countries crowded with a de-

cadent civilization. The circuit of the earth is completed;

migration has come to its term; here, upon these plains, the

problems of history are to be solved; here, if anywhere, is to

rise that city of God, the New Jerusalem, whose glories are to

fill the earth. 0, let us not forget what foundations we are lay-

ing, what empires are to stand upon them; and in the fear of

God and the love of man let us build here a city in whose light

the nations of the earth shall walk; whereinto kings may bring

their glory and honor; into which there shall enter nothing

that worketh abomination or maketh a lie.

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