Part 6

An assembling of envoys of organized governments, however limited in their number and whatever its object may be, is characteristic of a high civilization; but when that convening is as general in its character as this, it indicates marked progress in the establishment of a better understanding between interests and policies long antagonistic and at variance.

And when the object of such a meeting is, as in this case, to establish and cement friendly relations between people who differ in form of government, in religion, and in race, it means a distinct step toward the organization of a parliament, an accomplishment worthy of highest endeavor, because its consummation would result in universal peace.

When the civilized nations of the earth meet in friendly rivalry, their better acquaintance engenders increased respect. The closer commercial relations that follow are conducive to mutual benefit. They efface prejudice, they broaden sympathies, they deepen and widen the foundations of human progress.

The civilization of past ages would have experienced no overthrows if they had been based on intelligence of the masses and had been imbued with broader humanity which distinguishes and ennobles the fraternal spirit of the twentieth century.

The cycle of one hundred years, whose close we have just passed, incomparable as it was in the discovery and the invention and the application of forces and methods in the physical world, and remarkable as it was for an advancement in every line of thought and research, will be surpassed and distanced by the new century upon which we have entered if the material potentialities and the intellectual faculties of mankind can be utilized and trained toward a common end, and that end the uplifting of the human race and the promotion of its happiness.

Concomitant with industrial progress is social development. The policy of engaging in foreign wars in order to prevent or to pacify domestic unrest may have been wise if not humane, but the time for such a policy has passed. That government is strongest whose subjects are intelligent and contented. Contentment follows the employment of intellectual faculties, in the development of natural resources, and in the production of those activities that result in greater comforts of living and higher planes of thought. The bringing together in a Universal Exposition of the best that all civilized countries have produced, opens to all who participate new lines of thought, better methods and better appliances, and, therefore, conduces to the material benefit of every country participating. It promotes universal economy of human endeavor by enabling the countries taking part to determine through a comparison of their exhibits the lines in which they can produce the best results.

The economy of the world for saving time and energy by the adaptation of physical and intellectual forces to pursuits in which they are most effective, is a profitable study for nations, as it is for individuals. Hand in hand, however, with such occupation should go the cultivation of the taste for the beautiful, and an abounding conviction that man is his brother's keeper and has an inalienable obligation to better the condition of his fellows.

The International Exposition whose dedication you honor by your presence, was conceived in an effort to commemorate a great achievement which has proven a potent factor in increasing our wealth and sustaining our institutions and perpetuating our independence.

The interest manifested by the governments and people whom you represent in pledges of participating has been encouraging and helpful in the highest degree, and we are glad of the opportunity to express our deep gratitude. Your coming enables us to show you the scope of the undertaking we have launched. Our plans are ambitious and our hopes high, but we are energetic and untiring, and with your recognition and assistance we expect to carry to a successful consummation an enterprise which will not only assemble the natural resources of the earth and bring together the best products of human skill, but will be the occasion for eliciting the expression of the best thought and for classifying and systematizing all human knowledge.

We hope this exposition will be an epitome of the progress of the world from the beginning of history. The nineteenth century was characterized by unprecedented and almost incomprehensible industrial advancement. The earth was made to reveal its hidden treasures. The unknown forces of nature were harnessed and utilized. Lines of commerce were established which encircle the earth.

Sections of the globe remote and almost unknown to each other were brought into close communication and friendly relation. It would seem that there is little to be done in the field of scientific effort. But every discovery and every advance opens a broader plane for the exercise of human ingenuity.

The problems, however, that seem to confront us most prominently to-day, and that require for their solution not only experience and intelligence, but fraternal sentiment as well, are those of a social character. The aggregation that we call society is bound together by ties of sympathy, strengthened it may be by culture, but often strained by selfishness and pride. The relation of man to nature and her physical forces commands the highest functions of the mind, but the relation of man to his fellows not only enlists the highest intellectual effort, but requires that it be tempered by impulses of human kindness. Those who have as the mainspring of their actions the elevation of their fellows live and move upon a higher plane and are better members of society than those who subordinate sentiment and sympathy to gain and power.

The earth in its fertility and resourcefulness furnishes material sufficient to maintain in comfort all of its sons. If their genius and energy could be devoted to the utilization of that material instead of to a continuous struggle between themselves for occupation and possession, the destiny of the human race would be higher and nobler and nearer in accord with the immortal principles enunciated by Him whose life and teachings have for nearly two thousand years been a rule of conduct for man, while broadening his usefulness and enhancing his happiness.

That this exposition may be a powerful aid in the elevation and advancement of the human race is the prayer of those who organized and have brought it to its present stage of progress. That the countries for which you stand may unite with us in promoting an undertaking fraught with much good to humanity is the earnest wish of the local management and the sincere hope of every right-thinking citizen of the American Republic.

Again, I welcome you as guests whom we delight to honor for your personal worth, as well as for what you represent.

Fourth. Music, United States Marine Band, "Marseillaise Hymn of Liberty."

Fifth. Address by the French ambassador, M. Jean J. Jusserand:

When the treaty signed in Paris one hundred years ago, and by which the area of the United States was to be more than doubled, stood for ratification before Congress, there were, contrary to what we might suppose, protracted discussions and objections of many sorts. Some thought that the title to the new acquisition was not a sufficient one; others were anxious on account of the very magnitude of the new territories, and expressed the fear that the federal tie would be loosened if extended to such remote and partially unknown regions. Many were the criticisms and long the speeches.

Senator Jackson, of Georgia, rose and turning toward one of the hostile parties, said: "In a century, sir, we shall be well populated * * * and instead of the description given of it by the honorable gentleman, instead of howling wilderness where no civilized foot shall ever tread, if we could return at the proper period, we should find it the seat of science and civilization."

Senator Jackson's time has come the very year he named; one century has just elapsed since he spoke. If he could return among us, he would see no howling wilderness, but one of the most brilliant gatherings which this country has ever beheld, including the Chief of the State and a former Chief of the State, representatives of all the powers of the globe, soldiers and sailors, priests, magistrates, savants, artists, tradesmen and agriculturists, workmen and citizens innumerable, all bent upon consecrating by their presence and homage the work done during the hundred years. Good work indeed; nay, stupendous.

Sanguine as he was, Senator Jackson would, I think, scarcely believe his eyes and ears if he saw the matchless sight we presently behold, and the preparation for the pending exhibition of the produce, all the discoveries, all the art of the wide earth.

He would scarcely believe his ears if he heard that we came in twenty-seven hours from the place where he had delivered his prophecy and which had become only two years before the seat of Government. No less would be his surprise, if he learned that the supposed "howling wilderness" had been turned into an immense garden, dotted with wealthy towns; that all the land called in his days Louisiana produces yearly now millions of bushels of various kinds of grain, and that the private belongings of the successors of the scattered settlers of his time are valued in ours at many millions of dollars.

But he would not be surprised if he learned that the federal tie has not been loosened; that the number of States has increased, their wealth, too, the number of their inhabitants, their importance in every respect, and that they consider as more and more sacred the bond which unites them to the older part of the community. Such are the effects of liberty and just laws.

In this triumphal day, amid the shouts of joy, the reports of the guns and ringing of the bells, considering the splendid results, it is only natural that we carry our look backward to the past and have a thought for the lonely pioneers of long ago, who came one by one to this then unknown land, and who tried among incredible difficulties to make it less unknown, to make it more productive and easier to reclaim for you, their distant inheritors. No one, I am sure, will think it amiss that I, a compatriot of theirs and a representative of their country, shall recall at this day their efforts, and express to-day's gratitude for yesterday's work. For they were hardy men, those children of distant France; they were plucky, enterprising, and courageous; they led strenuous lives indeed; all qualities for which you ever had a special regard. To say that they did not fear danger is to slander them; they loved it.

Soldiers, missionaries, governors of cities, explorers came year after year from the time of Louis XIV, attracted by the chances or the beauty of the unknown and the opportunity of increasing their country's dominions, or of becoming famous, or of instructing souls, and of dying, if death was to be met, bravely and honorably. Very French they were, with all the qualities of their race, and something else, perhaps, some of them, than the qualities.

As they went down the great rivers from the regions of the Canadian lakes to the Mexican sea they gave them French names, and the reading of a map of that epoch reminds one of the century of the Sun King. There he is with all his court, figured in lands, cities, lakes, and rivers. Louisiana bears his own name; Lake Pontchartrain the name of his minister for marine; Fort Duquesne, the name of his famous sailor. There were also the rivers Colbert and Seigneley, better known nowadays as Mississippi and Illinois. One of the Great Lakes had been named after the Duke of Orleans; another, the great Conde, the winner of Rocroy; another after his brother, Prince de Conti; but this last inland sea, as indeed most of the others, soon resumed its Indian name, the homely name of Lake Erie, the Lake of the Cat.

Very French they were, those men--this Father Marquette, who, with Joliet, first beheld the magnificent water that washes your walls, the vast existence of which was then unknown, and who explored it down to the country of the Arkansas; this Robert Cavalier Sieur de la Salle, who had, long before our days, our days' notions of the importance of great commercial routes; whose purpose was to open one to China across this continent at the very spot where your northern lines of railways have opened theirs; who called his first house on American soil La China in order that he might never forget his initial purpose. He died in the quest, but not before he had explored the Mississippi down to its mouth; not before he had ascertained that its source was to the West, and that the river therefore could be used as a guiding thread toward the Pacific; not before he had made the first French settlement in this, your country, and given it a name, which has not been replaced by another, and is its present name of Louisiana.

Long is the roll and great were the hardships. To the same region, with the same object of discovering and improving, came that typical cadet De Gascogne, the Chevalier Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, who, on the 21st of July, 1701, unfurled the French flag at a certain spot where he began the building of a town, now the town of Detroit. He became afterwards governor of Louisiana. Then such men came as Du Tissnet, as the brothers Le Moine de Iberville and Le Moine de Bienville, this last the founder of New Orleans; as Father de Charlevoix, who gave the best account we have of the country, and spoke most wisely about its future; as La Clede, worthier than anyone to be remembered at this day and this place, as he was the founder of your town.

The exploration of the coasts had been comparatively easy, and thousands had attempted it. Settlers from France were the first to try their chance inland; they traveled across a huge continent more unknown then to the civilized world than was in our time the Africa of Livingstone and Stanley. They did it in a cheerful, optimistic spirit that nothing daunted but death. Living as they did in truly "howling wildernesses," there remained yet with them something of the mother country; and that appeared not only in their speech and manners, but in their very attitudes. Charlevoix meets figures of dead men fabricated by Indians. He was glad to find that they were represented with falling arms, from which he concluded that the authors of the trophies had massacred some of their own kin. When Indians killed French people, the figures represented men with their fist on their hip, Versailles fashion.

How could it be otherwise when they lived, some of them, on a settlement owned by a gentleman called d'Artagnan and managed, as was appropriate, by two musketeers. One almost expects the names of those two to have been Porthos and Aramis; but they were d'Artiguidres and De Benac.

And these men recalled their country in more important things than names and attitudes. Cadillac had scarcely given a name to the spot where he meant to create a town than he sent for his wife and younger son. It was to be a town, indeed, with wives and children and family life, and it was so, and it has ever been so since Cadillac willed it. When La Salle was killed in his second journey to the Mississippi in 1687, he had with him his brother and two nephews. The newcomers soon discovered that the region was not the metallic eldorado they had heard of it in Europe, but that it was a matchless agricultural country, and they began cutting the trees and tilling the ground, with none of the modern instruments and helps, no harvesting machines from "Chicago," as the then desert spot was called in their days; no horses, no horned cattle. They led, indeed not in fiction, but in truth--and long before the famous "Mariner of York" was wrecked by the Orinoco River--the life of Robinson Crusoe. Unknown to Europe, far from any neighbors, by the shade of the pathless forest, they tried their best. They died, many of them obscurely, leaving no name to be engraved on the bronze tables of history, but leaving better than a mere name--families, many of which still subsist; better than families--examples of earnestness and endurance, creating a tradition which will never die out, "Rien ne se perd."

The greatness of their difficulties, the scantiness of their means, the wisdom of many of their views are equally striking. More than one did their utmost to teach and improve their Indian neighbor. They forbade at an early date the selling to them of the destructive "fire water." Cadillac did so from the first; the Marquis de Vaudreuil reissued the same orders later. They soon discovered that the northern regions alone could produce wheat enough to feed the whole country, "though it should be quite peopled down to the sea." The question of labor was one of prominent difficulty and importance. Should it be hired labor of freemen or the compulsory labor of the imported negro? On this, one of those early French explorers, Charlevoix, summed up his opinion in the following memorable sentence: "Hired servants should be preferred. When the time of their service is expired they become inhabitants and increase the number of the King's natural subjects, whereas the slaves are always strangers. And who can be assured that by continually increasing in our colonies they will not one day become formidable enemies? Can we depend upon slaves who are only attached to us by fear and for whom the very land where they are born has not the dear name of mother country?"

More striking than all was the observation of a Frenchman who never visited America, except in thought, but saw distinctly its future. When no one yet believed it, that great economist and statesman, Turgot, said: "America one day will be free."

Years went on. The dark shadows and splendid rays of light with which French history is interwoven shone and vanished in their grand and awful alternance. One day the French flag was lowered in Louisiana; that was at the close of the Seven Years War. Another day the same flag was seen on the mast of a small vessel leaving the harbor at Bordeaux and sailing for America. The ship happened to bear the auspicious name of _La Victoire_, and it bore Lafayette. Then it was the alliance of 1778, and the coming on the same year of the first envoy accredited by any nation to this country, my predecessor, Gerard de Rayneval, a staunch friend of America; then the peace of 1783, when, with the assent of the whole world, to the joy of every French heart, 13 stars shone on the American flag.

France recovered, then, neither Louisiana nor Canada, nor anything. But she never intended it. She won a friend, and such a friend is better than any province.

She was very happy, having exactly fulfilled without change, bargain, or extenuation the task she had mapped out for herself in 1778, when she declared in the alliance treaty that the "direct and essential object of the same was efficaciously to maintain the freedom, sovereignty, and absolute and illimited independence of the United States." The joy was such in Paris at the news of American independence that performances in the theaters were interrupted; the great event was announced, and audiences rose to their feet to cheer the new-born Republic. Festivities were given and colored prints were scattered all over France for the benefit of those who could not be present. Such souvenirs were proudly kept in families. One such came to the remote house of my own parents in the mountains, and it was carefully preserved and I possess it at this day.

France followed her destinies; in 1800 Louisiana was French again; three years later on the spontaneous proposal of the French Republic, not New Orleans alone, not a mere strip of land, but the whole country became forever American.

The treaty signed one hundred years and a day ago had little precedent in history; it dealt with territories larger than the Empire of Alexander; it followed no war; it was preceded by no shedding of human blood; the new possessions got a hundred times more than they even thought of demanding, and the negotiations were so simple, the good faith and mutual friendship so obvious, that all was concluded in a fortnight. The simplest protocol on postal or sanitary questions takes nowadays more time. Each party found its interest in the transaction, but something more than interest led the affair to a speedy conclusion and that was the deep-rooted sympathy of the French and American nations.

The French were simply continuing what they had begun; they had wished America to be free and they were glad to think that she would be great. Money was paid, it is true; had this been the main consideration, Louisiana would have been preserved, for the money was not by far the equivalent of the buildings and lands belonging to the State. Part of the money was employed in satisfying American claims. "Those," says the French negotiator, Marbois, "who knew the importance of a good understanding between these two countries, attached more importance to the $4,000,000 set apart for American claims than to the $12,000,000 offered to France."

An impending war in Europe, the possibilities of an occupation of Louisiana by a foreign power was not, either, the main motive. In the council held at the Tuileries on Easter day, 1803, the Marshal and Prince of Wagram, Berthier, whose first war had been the war of American independence, said, as to this: "If Louisiana is taken from us by our rivals what does it matter? Other possessions would soon be in our hands, and by means of an exchange, we should quickly obtain a restitution." He concluded, "No navy without colonies, no colonies without a navy."

Add again that the value of Louisiana was much better understood than it had been before. "I know the worth of what I give up," said Bonaparte; and the French Government knew it indeed. They acted with open eyes, for they had taken care from the year 1800 to gather all available information. One of the memoirs with which they enlightened themselves had been asked of Louis Vilemont, former captain in the regiment of Louisiana. It is still unpublished; and it informed the Government that "from various reports of Canadian and Indian hunters it is possible to walk from Missouri to the sea in less than two months and a half."

An access to the Pacific was not so easy as now, but yet an access was practicable, and the wealth of the country was extraordinary. Warming at the souvenir of what he knew, the retired officer exclaimed, "What sources of wealth can we not expect to find in those parts! At each step made from east to west all produce, all things increase tenfold. It seems as if nature had made this corner of the globe the most favored one of our immense empire. The samples of all reigns have more beauty and majesty than anywhere else. The men born there look more like the descendants of Alcides than the kinsmen of the tribes who worship Manitou."