Page:Pacific Historical Review, volume 1, number 1.djvu/12

 of the mountain, pointing with outstretched arm to the western horizon, and saying to the flying passenger, “There is the East! There is India!”

Last, but not least, it was during this decade that California came within the scope of practical politics and Manifest Destiny. “California,” declared Benton in 1846, “become independent of Mexico by the revolt of the Picos, and independent of them by the revolt of the American settlers, had its destiny to fulfill — which was, to be handed over to the United States. So that its incorporation with the American Republic was equally sure in any and every event.” In a political letter in the same year, William H. Seward announced his belief that “Our population is destined to roll its resistless waves to the icy barriers of the North, and to encounter oriental civilization on the shores of the Pacific.”

Thus early did Seward enter upon his grandiloquent career as perhaps the most persistent exponent of the doctrine of America’s unescapable and all-including destiny. To him no prospect was more exhilarating than that offered by the opportunities on the shores of the Pacific and across its waters. “The Atlantic states, through their commercial, social, and political affinities and sympathies,” said he, during the debate on the admission of California in 1850, “are steadily renovating the governments and the social constitutions of Europe and of Africa. The Pacific states must necessarily perform the same sublime and beneficient functions in Asia. If, then, the American people shall remain an undivided nation, the ripening civilization of the West, after a separation growing wider and wider for four thousand years, will, in its circuit of the world, meet again and mingle with the declining civilization of the East on our own free soil, and a new and more perfect civilization will arise to bless the earth, under the sway of our own cherished and beneficient democratic institutions.” Later in