like in Japan: our arts and productions begin to penetrate both. As the
walls of a modern house are perforated with water-pipes, sound-pipes,
gas-pipes, heat-pipes, so geography and geology are yielding to man's
convenience, and we begin to perforate and mould the old ball, as a
carpenter does with wood. All is ductile and plastic. We are working the
new Atlantic telegraph. American energy is overriding every venerable
maxim of political science. America is such a garden of plenty, such a
magazine of power, that at her shores all the common rules of political
economy utterly fail. Here is bread, and wealth, and power, and
education for every man who has the heart to use his opportunity. The
creation of power had never any parallel. It was thought that the
immense production of gold would make gold cheap as pewter. But the
immense expansion of trade has wanted every ounce of gold, and it has
not lost its value.
See how nations of customers are formed. The disgust of California has
not been able to drive nor kick the Chinaman back to his home; and now
it turns out that he has sent home to China American food and tools and
luxuries, until he has taught his people to use them, and a new market
has grown up for our commerce. The emancipation has brought a whole
nation of negroes as customers to buy all the articles which once their
few masters bought, and every manufacturer and producer in the North has
an interest in protecting the negro as the consumer of his wares.
The whole history of our civil war is rich in a thousand anecdotes
attesting the fertility of resource, the presence of mind, the skilled
labor of our people. At Annapolis a regiment, hastening to join the
army, found the locomotives broken, the railroad destroyed, and no
rails. The commander called for men in the ranks who could rebuild the
road. Many men stepped forward, searched in the water, found the hidden
rails, laid the track, put the disabled engine together, and continued
their journey. The world belongs to the energetic man. His will gives
him new eyes. He sees expedients and means where we saw none. The
invalid sits shivering in lamb's-wool and furs; the woodsman knows how
to make warm garments out of cold and wet themselves. The Indian, the
sailor, the hunter, only these know the power of the hands, feet, teeth,
eyes, and ears. It is out of the obstacles to be encountered that they
make the means of destroying them. The sailor by his boat and sail makes
a ford out of deepest waters. The hunter, the soldier, rolls himself in
his blanket, and the falling snow, which he did not have to bring in his
knapsack, is his eider-down, in which he sleeps warm till the morning.
Nature herself gives the hint and the example, if we have wit to take
it. See how Nature keeps the lakes warm by tucking them up under a
blanket of ice, and the ground under a cloak of snow. The old forester
is never far from shelter; no matter how remote from camp or city, he
carries Bangor with him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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