an estuary, or an arm of the sea, penetrating into the North American continent farther than from New York to Liverpool, with a coast-line of thirty-two thousand miles, having hundreds of populous towns and cities, and innumerable ports and havens, from which the agricultural and manufactured products of one-third of the arable surface of the United States can be shipped to all parts of the globe. The territory which it drains is considerably larger than Central Europe. Lying wholly in the temperate zone, equally removed from the languors of the tropics and the rigors of the pole, its climate favorable to health and longevity, its calcareous soil adapted to every variety of agriculture, it is the region where the elements of prosperity are most abundant and stable, and the conditions of happiness most permanent and secure, among the habitations of men. One hundred years ago the pioneers from New England, the advanceguard of the great column of Anglo-Saxon migration, that has during the interval marched to the Pacific, abolishing the frontier and conquering the desert, descended the western slopes of the Alleghanies into the valley of the Ohio and disappeared in its solitudes. Chicago, Cincinnati, and St. Louis were outposts of civilization, exposed to the brand and the tomahawk. A few log huts, trading-stations, and missionhouses were scattered along the crumbling banks of the rivers and in the profound depths of the forests. There were neither highways nor public conveyances; commerce, agriculture, nor manufactures; no schools, churches, nor society; nothing but nature and its vicissitudes, the savage and his prey. From that unsurveyed wilderness, in less than a century, twentyone States have been admitted into the Union, having an area of eight hundred million acres, a population of more than thirty-five millions, and wealth beyond measurement or computation. Sparsely inhabited, with rude and unscientific methods, its resources hardly touched, the States of the Mississippi Valley last year produced more than threequarters of the sugar, coal, corn, iron, oats, wheat, cotton, tobacco, lead, hay, lumber, wool, pork, beef, horses, and mules of the entire country, together with a large fraction of its gold and silver. Their internal commerce is already greater than all the foreign commerce of the combined nations of the earth. China supports four hundred million people upon an area smaller and less fertile. The civilization of Egypt, whose monuments have for forty centuries excited the awe and admiration of mankind, was nourished by the cultivation of less than ten thousand square miles, in the narrow valley and delta of the Nile. The delta of the Rhine, and the adjacent lands reclaimed from the Zuyder Zee, less than fifteen thousand square miles, have long sustained the United Kingdom of the Netherlands and given to a dense population wealth, comfort, and contentment. The delta of the Mississippi, below its junction with the Ohio, richer than the Nile or the Rhine, exceeds the combined area of Holland and Egypt, and is destined under the stimulus of free labor and the incentives of self-government to build a fabric of society more opulent and enduring. Add to this the inexhaustible alluvion of the streams above, and the fertile prairies from which they descend, and the arithmetic of the past has no logarithms with which to compute the problems of the economic and commercial future of the West. It will be predominant in the development, not of this country alone, but of the hemisphere, and will give direction to the destinies of the human race. We stand in the vestibule. We have not yet entered the temple. When the first furrow was broken on the prairies of Illinois, there was not an iron ploughshare in the world. Men are yet living who might have seen the first steamboat on Western waters, on her trial-trip from Pittsburg in 1811, and who were in active life when the first passenger rode in a railway-train and the first telegraphic despatch was sent. The early settlers of Missouri had to depend on flint and tinder for fire. Most of the inventions in machinery, nearly all the appliances for comfort and convenience, were unknown to the pioneers of the West. Their victories were won with few of the methods and devices now regarded as indispensable in even the humblest walks of life. When its agricultural, mining, and manufacturing resources are fully developed by steam and electricity, the Mississippi Valley will support and enrich, without crowding, five hundred million people, and be not only the granary, but the workshop, of the planet. Already by the readjustments of the Eleventh Census the centre and seat of political power has been transferred hither from the seaboard. The Central West, with its natural and inevitable allies, the States of the Gulf and the Southeast Atlantic, have a majority of the members of both houses of Congress, and of the College of Electors for President and Vice-President of the United States. They control the executive and legislative departments of the government. They hold the purse and sword of the nation, and will hereafter dictate its policy of administration. Sectional causes have delayed this coalition, but the estrangement is disappearing, and reconciliation will soon be complete. Invidious tariffs, inequitable railway-charges, and insuflBcient currency have hitherto imposed heavy burdens upon the laborers and producers of the West, to which they have submitted, not without protest against the injustice. They will hereafter demand relief, not at the sacrifice of the interests of the East and North, by a more uniform distribution of the benefits, privileges, and disadvantages of civilization. They will require rearrangement of custom-duties, so that taxation may fall equably upon those who work with their brains and those who toil with their hands. They will insist upon bimetallism, as the basis of a safe and abundant circulating medium, without which industry must languish and commerce decay. Recognizing the importance of inland navigation to national prosperity, and its necessity to prevent injurious railway-charges, the West will ask for the improvement of its water-ways and the development of internal communications, so as to connect the Mississippi with the Great Lakes at Chicago, with the Atlantic at New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Savannah, and by the Nicaragua Canal with the Pacific. By the enlargement of the Welland Canal, Chicago will be a seaport, and by deepening and straightening the channel of the Mississippi, long before the second century ends, ocean steamers will receive and discharge their cargoes at the port of St. Louis. By the construction of the Florida Ship-Canal the voyage to Liverpool will be shortened a thousand miles, and by the Nicaragua Canal the voyage from St. Louis to San Francisco will be shortened more than twenty-four thousand miles. Opposite the mouth of the Mississippi, and separated from our southern boundary by the Gulf of Mexico, lie the West India islands, with five million inhabitants, and the Spanish-American republics, with fifty million people and a territorial area nearly three times larger than that of the United States. Their relations with us are fraternal. They have adopted our political ideas and modelled their governments after ours. We form a family of nations, shut in by friendly oceans from foreign intrusion, ultimately to become federated from Cape Horn to the Arctic Sea. The railroad already constructed to Mexico will be continued south along the Isthmus to the coffee-fields of Brazil, connecting the valley of the Mississippi with the valleys of the Amazon and the Parana, and forming an unbroken line of railway from Boston to Rio Janeiro and Buenos Ayres. To control the commerce of these open, unsupplied, and growing countries, and to compete with formidable rivalry for the markets of India, China, Japan, Australia, and the archipelagoes of the Pacific, is the transcendent question before us. In this movement for supremacy, the West, the seat of political power, the centre of population, the storehouse of national wealth, will take the lead. Here, and not on the shores of the Thames, the Connecticut, or the Hudson, the destiny of the English-speaking people is to be accomplished, its final triumphs are to be won. Many perils are to be encountered; many battles to be fought; many dangers to be overcome. Discordant and incongruous elements are to be made homogeneous, and fused and blended into loyal, patriotic American citizenship. Imported ignorance, crime, and thriftlessness must be restricted. True liberty of speech, conscience, and the press must be maintained through public education and the separation of Church and State. The costly and destructive evils of intemperance must be overcome by morality and law. The tendency toward the congestion of population in great cities must be resisted by inducements toward the tranquillity and virtue of rural life. The rapidly-growing discontent at the unequal diffusion of wealth, and the alarming increase of socialism and anarchy, must be checked by private benevolence, and by such legislation as will prevent the indefinite transmission of inherited fortunes. The location of the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago marked an epoch in the relations between the East and the West. It was the tardy, but final, recognition of the commercial predominance of the West, as the session of all National Conventions in Western cities is an acknowledgment of political supremacy. Dominion has been reluctantly relinquished, but we shall have no more supercilious and self-complacent assumptions of patronizing superiority over the "wild and woolly West." To the myriads of visitors from Europe and the Orient, Chicago, and the journey to the West, will be a revelation. Should Gladstone and De Lesseps honor the opening ceremonies with their presence, the marvels of the new civilization they witness will far transcend the assembled glories and wonders of that which they have left. At the date of their birth, the State of Illinois, now third in population in the Union, was an unorganized territory. They will behold the domes and towers of a metropolis rivalling London and Paris in wealth, numbers, and splendor; the palaces of merchant princes; the endless avenues of trade; boulevards thronged with glittering equipages; the tumult of thoroughfares; the smoke of factories like the craters of volcanoes; the stately procession of ships along the horizon of the lake, and the marble terraces of its curving shores. To those unfamiliar with the prodigies of Western growth, it would appear incredible that the English statesman had entered upon his extraordinary Parliamentary career, and the French diplomatist distinguished himself in the consular service, before the village of Chicago had a corporate name, and that its municipal birth is coeval with the reign of Queen Victoria. Nor would the wonder be lessened by the knowledge that within this brief interval the city had been uplifted bodily from the mire of the morass in which it stood, and once rebuilt upon the cinders of the most destructive conflagration of modern times. With such courage, resolution, and energy, everything may be predicted except mediocrity, and nothing is impossible except failure and defeat. John James Ingalk. AT DEAD OF NIGHT. I WOKE at dead of night. The wind was high; My brain, ghoul-like, must dig where long had lain And see the gruesome dark within my room To hear reproachful voices from the tomb A stronger brain! God save me. from the gloom Carrie Blake Morgan. |