Page:The Ifs of History (1907).pdf/49

 Who can estimate the consequences of a fate which should have sent Columbus straight on his way! Who can compass the thought of the millions of country-loving Americans of our race unborn here, but nurtured under skies now foreign to their very nature, but for that glittering flock of tropical birds whirling southwestwardly? It is no idle conjecture; von Humboldt, one of the wisest of cosmographers, says that never in the world's history had the flight of birds such momentous consequences. "It may be said," he avers, "to have determined the first settlements in the new continent, and its distribution between the Latin and Germanic races." He believed that the Gulf Stream would have carried Columbus around Cape Hatteras. It might indeed have done so.

We of the United States may well believe that the hand of Providence guided those birds on that October day; but none the less are we com-