Page:The Pacific Monthly vol. 14.djvu/120

 ition.

had set up their missions in Mexican Cal- ifornia, a few Eussians had built a trad- ing fort at Sitka, a few ships had touched Oregon; but the United States was a clus- ter of obscure settlements looking to Eu- rope for news and merchandise. Europe, in the throes of continual conflict, paid little heed to infant America, even when Jefferson shut up her ports and sealed her warehouses. But America developed within and westward.

To-day, like thistle-down blown all abroad, ten thousand cities smile where yesterday the red man's cattle ran. To- day, when Koosevelt speaks, the nations listen.

To-day we celebrate not only the con- quest, the arduous, strenuous, and not al- ways peaceful conquest of the West, but the meeting with the East. The centennial expositions of Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis and Oregon are steps, promises and pi«ophesies of to-mororw, when, perhaps, Nome City will invite the nations to the

lair where late "the wolf's long howl was heard on Unalaska's shore."

The back door of America has become the front door of Asia, the portal up whose grand staircase ascends the wealth of Ormus and of Ind.

Fifty years ago American editors es- tablished a newspaper that is published to this day in that identical Panama whose wide-swung gate will soon admit the merchant marine of the world.

The sails that swept round purple Tyre and Sidon, to Carthage, Greece, and Ven- ice, to the Dutch of Holland, and to Eng- land, are whitening other and wider seas, distant no longer, but washing our own shores of the Pacific. And the signfi- cance lies in the diffusion of intelligence. For lack of it Russia has fallen. By sup- port of it Japan has risen.

That the advance guard of the Ameri- can college sailed in a whaling ship to Honolulu before Maine or Missouri were

A glimpse of the natural park on the Exposition grounds.