We go on apparently still without plan, apparently still borne forward in a throng resistless as of yore. Perhaps in the forefront of our ranks we carry trump of Jericho for other lands; if not in the bugle note of our armies, at least in the humming of our commerce. Let us hope that we do not invite a trumpet call at our own walls. A million dead men are forgotten. Our wars are as nothing. But a million live men, taken up bodily from one environment, and set down bodily in another environment in any antipodal quarter of the world—that means history; that spells questions in forethought; that bids rise an American statesmanship big and honest, not selfish, not corrupt, and not afraid! These questions are such as must be approached wholly without reference to party or to politics. It has been hitherto in America not so much a question of politics as of roads; but now the roads are builded that shall lead us to our City of Desire or to our Castle of Despair. Steam will establish our doctrines and our tariffs. But steam has no soul. To it, our flap-hatted frontiersman, our new-American, our product of a noble and unparalleled evolution, is but the same as the wrinkled-booted foreigner that puts down his black box in the middle of a Dakota prairie or in the heart of a crowded Eastern city. Steam has no care for the real glory of our flag. It cares naught for character. It does not love humanity. In it dwells no ancient love for the history of an America which at least might once have been dear to the heart of all humanity. Steam is an equalizer. It breaks down the lines between nations. It makes America like unto Europe, causing us to change to meet the changes of the Old World. If we be not careful we shall see going forward that equalizing of humanity that is brutalizing. And then in the good time of the ages we shall see cataclysm, revolution, change. Whatever the product of that change after the revolutions that are yet to be, no man of all the future will ever again behold a land like that American West which is now no more. That was indeed a land rich in the bounty of nature, rich in opportunity for humanity. It was a land where a man could indeed be a man; where indeed he might live honestly and cleanly and nobly, unshrinking from his fate, unfearing for his own survival, helpful to his neighbor, independent as to himself. Now we have seen our old rider going far, our flap-hatted man, the fearless one. He has strange company to-day, at home and abroad. In all reverence, let us hope that God may prosper him! In all reverence, let us hope that there may never arise from the great and understanding soul of any leader of this country that sad and bitter cry, “Give me back my Americans!” ----- Footnote 66: