Part 29

The seat of power ever shifts from land to land, from sea to sea. The earliest civilizations, those seated beside the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates, had little to do with sea traffic. But with the rise of those people who went down to the sea in ships, with the rise of the Phœnicians, the men of Tyre and Sidon, the Mediterranean became the central sea on whose borders lay the great wealthy and cultivated powers of antiquity. The war navies and the merchant marines of Carthage, Greece, and Rome strove thereon for military and industrial supremacy. Its control was the prerequisite to greatness, and the Roman became lord of the western world only when his fleet rode unchallenged from the Ægean to the Pillars of Hercules. Then Rome fell. But for centuries thereafter the wealth and the culture of Europe were centred on its southern shores, and the control of the Mediterranean was vital in favoring or checking their growth. It was at this time that Venice and Genoa flourished in their grandeur and their might.

But gradually the nations of the north grew beyond barbarism and developed fleets and commerce of their own. The North Sea, the Baltic, the Bay of Biscay, saw trading cities rise to become independent or else to become props of mighty civilized nations. The sea-faring merchants ventured with ever greater boldness into the Atlantic. The cities of the Netherlands, the ports of the Hansa, grew and flourished as once the Italian cities had grown. Holland and England, Spain, Portugal, and France sent forth mercantile adventurers to strive for fame and profit on the high seas. The Cape of Good Hope was doubled, America was discovered, and the Atlantic Ocean became to the greater modern world what the Mediterranean had been to the lesser world of antiquity.

Now, men and women of California, in our own day, the greatest of all the seas and the last to be used on a large scale by civilized man bids fair to become in its turn the first in point of importance. The empire that shifted from the Mediterranean will in the lifetime of those now children bid fair to shift once more westward to the Pacific. When the 19th century opened the lonely keels of a few whale ships, a few merchantmen, had begun to furrow the vast expanse of the Pacific; but as a whole its islands and its shores were not materially changed from what they had been in the long past ages when the Phœnician galleys traded in the purple of Tyre, the ivory of Libya, the gold of Cyprus. The junks of the Orient still crept between China and Japan and Farther India; and from the woody wilderness which shrouded the western shores of our own continent the red lords of the land looked forth upon a waste of waters which only their own canoes traversed. That was but a century ago; and now at the opening of the 20th century the change is so vast that it is wellnigh impossible for us to estimate its importance. In the South Seas the great commonwealth of Australia has sprung into being. Japan, shaking off the lethargy of centuries, has taken her rank among civilized, modern powers. European nations have seated themselves along the eastern coast of Asia, while China by her misfortunes has given us an object-lesson in the utter folly of attempting to exist as a nation at all if both rich and defenceless.

Meanwhile our own mighty Republic has stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and now in California, Oregon, and Washington, in Alaska, Hawaii and the Philippines, holds an extent of coast line which makes it of necessity a power of the first class in the Pacific. The extension in the area of our domain has been immense, the extension in the area of our influence even greater. America’s geographical position on the Pacific is such as to ensure our peaceful domination of its waters in the future if only we grasp with sufficient resolution the advantages of that position. We are taking long strides in that direction; witness the cables we are laying down, the steamship lines we are starting—some of them already containing steamships larger than any freight carriers that have previously existed. We have taken the first steps toward digging an Isthmian canal, to be under our own control, a canal which will make our Atlantic and Pacific coast lines in effect continuous, which will be of incalculable benefit to our mercantile navy, and above all to our military navy in the event of war.

The inevitable march of events gave us the control of the Philippine Islands at a time so opportune that it may without irreverence be called Providential. Unless we show ourselves weak, unless we show ourselves degenerate sons of the sires from whose loins we sprang, we must go on with the work we have undertaken. I most earnestly hope that this work will ever be of a peaceful character. We infinitely desire peace, and the surest way of obtaining it is to show that we are not afraid of war. We should deal in a spirit of justice and fairness with weaker nations, and we should show to the strongest that we are able to maintain our rights. Such showing can not be made by bluster; for bluster merely invites contempt. Let us speak courteously, deal fairly, and keep ourselves armed and ready. If we do these things we can count on the peace that comes to the just man armed, to the just man who neither fears nor inflicts wrong. We must keep on building and maintaining a thoroughly efficient navy, with plenty of the best and most formidable ships, with an ample supply of officers and men, and with those officers and men trained in the most efficient fashion to perform their duties. Only thus can we assure our position in the world at large. It behooves all men of lofty soul fit and proud to belong to a mighty nation to see to it that we keep our position in the world; for our proper place is with the great expanding peoples, with the peoples that dare to be great, that accept with confidence a place of leadership in the world. All our people should take that position, but especially of California, you of the Pacific Slope, for much of our expansion must go through the Golden Gate, and inevitably you who are seated by the Pacific must take the lead in and must profit by the growth of American influence along the coasts and among the islands of that mighty ocean, where east and west finally become one.

The citizen that counts, the man that counts in our life, is the man who endeavors not to shirk difficulties but to meet and overcome them, is the man who endeavors not to lead his life in the world’s soft places, not to walk easily and take his comfort, but the man who goes out to tread the rugged ways that lead to honor and success, the ways the treading of which means good work worthily done.

What father or what mother here, if capable of taking the right view, does not wish to see his or her children grow up trained, not to flinch but to overcome, trained not to avoid whatever is hard and rough and difficult, but to go down into the hurly-burly of actual life and win glory in the arena, heedless of the dust and the sweat and blood of the contest?

You men of the West, the older among you, came here and hewed out your own fates for yourselves. The younger among you are the heirs of the men who did this, and you can not, unless you are false to your blood, desire to see the Nation, which is but the aggregate of the individuals, act otherwise than in the way which you esteem as honorable for the individual.

Our place as a Nation is and must be with the nations that have left indelibly their impress on the centuries. Men will tell you that the great expanding nations of antiquity have passed away. So they have; and so have all others. Those that did not expand passed away and left not so much as a memory behind them. The Roman expanded, the Roman passed away, but the Roman has left the print of his law, of his language, of his masterful ability in administration, deep in the world’s history, deeply imprinted in the character of the races that came after him. I ask that this people rise level to the greatness of its opportunities. I do not ask that it seek for the easiest path.

If our fathers had preferred ease to effort, if they had been content to say: “Go in peace; we would prefer that the Union were kept, but we are not willing to pay the price in blood and effort of keeping it”; if they had done that there is not a man or woman in this hall who would now walk with head erect, who would now have the right to feel, as we have the right to feel, that we challenge equality with the citizens of the proudest country that the world has yet seen. I ask that this generation and future generations strive in the spirit of those who strove to found the Republic, of those who strove to save and perpetuate it. I ask that this Nation shape its policy in a spirit of justice toward all, a spirit of resolute endeavor to accept each duty as the duty comes, and to rest ill-content until that duty is done. I ask that we meet the many problems with which we are confronted from without and from within, not in the spirit that seeks to purchase present peace by the certainty of future disaster, but with a wise, a fearless, and a resolute desire to make of this Nation in the end, as the centuries go by, the example for all the nations of the earth, to make of it a nation in which we shall see the spirit of peace and of justice incarnate, but in which also we shall see incarnate the spirit of courage, of hardihood, the spirit which while refusing to wrong the weak is incapable of flinching from the strong.

AT THE CEREMONIES INCIDENT TO THE BREAKING OF SOD FOR THE ERECTION OF A MONUMENT IN MEMORY OF THE LATE PRESIDENT McKINLEY, SAN FRANCISCO, CAL., MAY 13, 1903

_Friends and Fellow-Americans_:

It is a befitting thing that the first sod turned to prepare for the monument to commemorate President McKinley should be turned in the presence of his old comrades of the great war, and in the presence of the men who in a lesser war strove to show that they were not wholly unworthy of those who in the dark years of ’61 to ’65 proved their truth by their endeavor, and with their blood cemented the foundation of the American Republic. It is a solemn thing to speak in memory of a man who when young went to war for the honor and the life of the Nation, who for four years did his part in the camp, on the march, in battle, rising steadily upward from the ranks, and to whom it was given in after life to show himself exemplary in public and in private conduct, to become the ideal of the Nation in peace as he had been a typical representative of the Nation’s young sons in war.

It is not too much to say that no man since Lincoln was as widely and as universally beloved in this country as was President McKinley; for it was given to him not only to rise to the most exalted station but to typify in his character and conduct those virtues which any citizen worthy of the name likes to regard as typically American; to typify the virtues of cleanly and upright living in all relations private and public, in the most intimate family relations, in the relations of business, in relations with his neighbors, and finally in his conduct of the great affairs of state. And exactly as it was given to him to do his part in settling aright the greatest problem which it has ever befallen this Nation to settle since it became a Nation—the problem of the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery—exactly as it was his good fortune to do his part as a man should in his youth in settling that great problem, so it was his good fortune, when he became in fact and in name the Nation’s chief, to settle the problems springing out of the Spanish War; problems less important only than those which were dealt with by the men who under the lead of Washington founded our government and the men who, upholding the statesmanship of Lincoln and following the sword of Grant, or Sherman, or Thomas, or Sheridan, saved and perpetuated the Republic.

When 1898 came and the war which President McKinley in all honesty and in all sincerity sought to avoid became inevitable and was pressed upon him he met it as he and you had met the crisis of 1861. He did his best to prevent the war coming; once it became evident that it had to come then he did his best to see that it was ended as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. It is a good lesson for nations and individuals to learn never to hit if it can be helped and then never to hit softly. I think it is getting to be fairly understood that that is our foreign policy. We do not want to threaten; certainly we do not desire to wrong any man; we are going to keep out of trouble if we possibly can keep out; and if it becomes necessary for our honor and our interest to assert a given position we shall assert it with every intention of making the assertion good.

The Spanish War came. As its aftermath came trouble in the Philippines, and it was natural that this State, within whose borders live and have lived so many of the men who fought in the great war, should find its sons eagerly volunteering for the chance to prove their truth in the war that came in their days; and it was to be expected that California’s sons should do well, as they did do well, in the Philippines in the new contest.

And now it is eminently fitting that the men of the great war and the men of the lesser war claiming not only to have been good soldiers but to be good citizens should come here to assist at laying the foundation of the monument to him who typified in his career the virtues of the soldier and exemplified in his high office our ideals of good citizenship. I am glad that such a monument should have been erected here in this wonderful State on the shores of the Pacific; in this city with a great past and with a future so great that the most sanguine among us can not properly estimate it; this city of the Occident which looks west to the Orient across the Pacific, westward to the west that is the hoary east; this city situated upon that giant ocean which will in a not distant future be commercially the most important body of water in the entire world.

I thank you for coming here and for giving me the privilege of joining with you to-day in these solemn ceremonies of commemoration, the ceremonies of laying the foundation of a monument which is to keep green in mind the memory of McKinley as a lesson in war and a lesson in peace, as a lesson to all Americans of what can be done by the American who in good faith strives to do his whole duty by the mighty Republic.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

Illustrations without captions have had a description added, this is denoted with parentheses.

Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within the text and consultation of external sources.

Some hyphens in words have been silently removed, some added, when a predominant preference was found in the original book.

Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text, and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.

Pg 12: “hundreth” replaced with “hundredth” Pg 12: “thoroughout” replaced with “throughout” Pg 345: “encouragaging” replaced with “encouraging”