269. A Favored Nation
A Favored Nation
Isa_26:15 : ’93Thou hast increased the nation, O Lord, thou hast increased the nation.’94
As sometimes in the summer noon when all the harvest-fields are flooded with light the air is suddenly darkened and you look up to find that it is the wing of hawk or eagle flying over the plain, so these sheaves of Northern wheat and Southern rice gathered in this Thanksgiving service are suddenly shadowed with the black wing of Death. Our beloved Vice-President, Thomas A. Hendricks, has departed. But it would be unwise to make this occasion sombre and funereal, and so I adjourn until my lecture tomorrow night the tribute to my warm personal friend, Thomas A. Hendricks. For surely if the departed Governor, who had by his own proclamation again and again called the people to thanksgiving, were allowed to speak, he would charge the officiating clergy today to stir the gladness and joy and gratitude of the people by recital of our national blessings, and in no wise be hindered by personal griefs.
The optimists and pessimists and grain merchants and fruit dealers and dry-goods men and farmers have told us such diverse stories about the real condition of this country, that I was in a great fog on the subject; so that last week I appealed to the headquarters at Washington for accurate information, and I have now not the surmises or the guesses to present, but the facts received yesterday by letter from the United States Department of Agriculture, and I hereby publicly acknowledge my indebtedness to those obliging and skilful officials, especially Mr. Nesbit and Mr. Dodge. On this day, celebrative of temporal blessings, we will take larger liberty of thought and illustration than we allow ourselves in the Sabbath pulpit.
As a firm foundation on which to build your thanksgivings today observe:
Fact the first: That the wheat crop of the country yields this year three hundred and fifty million bushels. And add to that the surplus which we had over from last year, and you will find that America owns more wheat today than ever before since the world stood. All grain this year will make an aggregate of three million bushels more than ever.
Fact the second: The corn crop exceeds all its predecessors in absolute quantity. Though not as much per acre, yet more acres have yielded, and so the corn-bin of the nation is better filled today than ever before.
Fact the third: Unmanufactured cotton exported this year is valued at two hundred and one million nine hundred and sixty-two thousand five hundred and eighty-eight dollars, being five million dollars more sent to other countries this year than last, the exports of cotton this year twenty-nine million pounds more than last.
Fact the fourth: The tobacco crop is so luxuriant that we exported twenty-seven million pounds more this year than last year. A well-known and popular weed that is good for many things, tobacco is’97to kill moths in wardrobes, and tick in sheep, and to strangulate all kinds of vermin, and to fumigate pestiferous places, and is death to all other malodors by its own superior power of stench, an article so useful to others that I wish we could export the entire crop.
Fact the fifth: The sugar crop is so large that we have sent abroad this year one hundred and seventy-six million five hundred thousand pounds more than last. In 1884 we exported seventy-six million pounds, receiving for it five million four hundred thousand dollars, while this year we sent abroad two hundred and fifty-two million five hundred thousand pounds, getting for them sixteen million dollars. I put the sixteen million dollars of this year against the five million dollars of last year and the two hundred and fifty-two million five hundred thousand pounds of this year against the seventy-six million pounds of last year.
The so-called bears in the grain market and all the other markets are such persistent, chronic, and hemispheric croakers, that the great masses of the people have no idea, until now I tell them, of what God is doing for this country. We had a bad winter, it was said. Yes. We had a bad spring, it was said. Yes. We had a bad summer. Yes. But we had a good God, and, notwithstanding all the deluges, and all the droughts, and all the frosts, and all the insects, and all the political excitements’97Republican, Democratic, and Mugwumpian’97the lap of the nation is filled with blessing. Shall we, then, render today a jeremiad or a grand march? It will all depend upon the way you look at things. There are two ways of putting things:
Raindrop the first: ’93Always chill and wet, tossed by the wind, devoured by the sea.’94
Raindrop the second: ’93Aha! the sun kissed me, the flowers caught me, the fields blessed me.’94
Brook the first: ’93Alas, me! struck of the rock, dashed of the mill-wheel.’94
Brook the second: ’93I sang the miller to sleep, I ground the grist; oh, this gay somersault over the wheel?’94
Horse the first: ’93Pull, pull, pull. This tugging in traces and holding back in the breeching, and standing at a post with a sharp wind hanging icicles from my nostrils.’94
Horse the second gives a horse laugh: ’93Useful life I have been permitted to live. See that corn! I helped break the sod and run out the furrows, and on a starlight night I filled the ravines and mountains with the voices of jingling bell and the laugh of the sleigh-riding party. Then to have the children throw in an extra quart at my winnowing, and to have Jane pat me on the nose, and say: ’91Poor Charlie!’92 To bound along with arched neck and flaming eye and clattering hoof; what an exhilaration.’94
Bird the first: ’93Weary of emigration; no one to pay me for song. Only here to be shot at.’94
Bird the second: ’93I have banquet of a thousand wheat-fields; cup of lily to drink out of, aisle of forest to walk in, Mount Washington under foot and a continent at a glance.’94
Different ways of putting things.
Give us full organ today. Pull out all the glad stops, and while we pray and while we sing let us make a joyful noise unto the Rock of our salvation. Gather your families together. Let your children be arrayed in their brightest robes. In the morning let the temples of God ring with hosannas, and in the night let your homes be filled with congratulation, laughter and song. Turn on all the lights; bracket, chandelier, and candelabra. Throw another armful of firewood on the hearth and let the fire blaze out cheerily. When you and I are gone and our children go out and look at the place where we sleep, may they be enabled to say: ’93There rest the father and mother who knew how to make their children happy on Thanksgiving Day.’94
On such a time as this shall we not render thanksgiving to God? What a wonderful change? It was not a great while ago when governments forbade religious assemblages; now they evoke them. The father, the husband, and the brother sit now at the end of the pew through custom’97a custom established in the dark ages of persecution, when it was necessary for the male members of the family to sit at the head of the church pew, armed for defence of those who could not defend themselves. Now, on Thanksgiving Day we meet in churches at the call of secular authority.
I find great cause of congratulation in our municipal propects. Our present Mayor retires from office with the kind wishes of our citizens, and our new Mayor will enter with the moral support of all good people of all parties. Municipal reform is a perpetual work, and every few years there need to be official brooms to sweep the city halls. For lack of it you know how in former years New York suffered. Never since God corrected the politics of Sodom by burying the city in brimstone were there greater outrages enacted on earth than in these clusters of cities under the disguise of municipal government. Frauds about parks, about pavements, about station-houses, about pipes, about city halls, about aqueducts, about courts, about election-frauds about everything. Fraudulent men applied for contracts of fraudulent officials, who wrote the contracts upon paper they had stolen, and then went home over pavements every stone of which had been put down in dishonesty, and in carriages every spoke and rivet of which were the evidences of their crime. Fraudulent election inspectors sat around fraudulent ballot-boxes and took fraudulent votes and made fraudulent returns, and sent to our State Legislatures men fit only for the idiot asylum or the penitentiary. Things went on until the decent people in all our cities were for ten years under saddest depression. The newspapers did not dare speak out for fear they would lose the public printing. The pulpits did not dare to speak out because there were prominent men in the churches who had one hand on the spoils and the other on the throat of the clergy, telling them they had better be prudent and keep quiet. Matters were beyond all human redemption, and no statesmanship, no human skill could ever have met the crises. But the Lord Almighty rose up and he put it into the hearts of the best men of both parties to band together and lay their hands to the work. The monstrosities were exposed, the vagabonds of fraud were arrested, and the work extended from New York until Brooklyn and Philadelphia and Boston and Chicago and all the cities felt the moral earthquake.
But every few years the work needs to be done over again in all our cities. Our Brooklyn city government costs too much and our taxes are infamous. Do you say that the city has enlarged and therefore it costs more to govern it? Yes, it has mightily enlarged, but the taxable property has also mightily increased, and it ought not to cost as much to govern a city with six hundred thousand inhabitants as when it held three hundred thousand, because there are more now to bear the burden. There is something wrong in the neighborhood of the City Hall. May the incoming administration discover and extirpate it. For the brightening prospects in all our cities we may this day appropriately lift the Jubilate.
I have much also to congratulate you upon in the condition and prospects of the nation. We have the most thorough feeling of amity in this country that we ever had. The hatred between North and South is not only healed, but the scars are gone. The oldest man among us never saw such brotherhood as today. Is it not a pity that the North and South have nothing to quarrel about? What a dismal failure the campaign orators made in the last Presidential election in their attempt to stir up the old feuds. We were for a great many years before the war and some years after the war under the delusion that we were at peace in this country, but there never has been any peace until within the past ten years.
Even at the time that Brooks was cudgeling Sumner and chains were stretched around Boston Court House to keep fugitives from escaping from the hands of the Marshal, and all our Northern cities were in riot and bloodshed about the relation of black men to their owners, we were under the delusion that we were at peace. Monstrous absurdity. It was war perpetual. Pennsylvania Hall burned on account of this political agitation in the city of Philadelphia’97was that peace? The printing press of the Alton Observer was thrown into the river’97was that peace? In 1820, when the air was hot with sectional imprecation about the admission of Missouri as a slave State’97was that peace? The burning of a college in New Hampshire in 1835 because colored youth were admitted’97was that peace? South Carolina nullification’97was that peace? Presbyterian and Methodist churches North and South split with a fracture that shook all Christendom on account of political agitation’97was that peace? No; all billingsgate and scorn and vituperation and hatred and revenge and blasphemy on both sides were exhausted. It was war of tongue, war of pen, war of trade, war of Church, war bitter, furious, consuming, relentless.
Thank God, that time has gone by! We have come to a new state of feeling and brotherhood such as we have never enjoyed, and our Congress, instead of spending nine-tenths of its time wasting the public treasury, discussing sectional difficulties as it used, will give nine-tenths of its time to the discussion of the agricultural, the mining, the manufacturing, the commercial, the literary, and the moral interests of this nation. Are we not to be thankful to God for this state of feeling? He has not dealt so with any other nation. Praise him all ye people!
I find further cause of congratulation in the development of our national resources. Our wisest men in all departments of merchandise say that business is looking up and that our greatest prosperities are yet to come. It is the inevitable law of nature, which is also the law of God, that the material resources of this country must in the future produce material wealth. You will hear the anvil ring with a sturdier blow. You will see the furnaces glow with a fiercer fire. You will see the wheel strike with a swifter dash. America has not yet been fully discovered. Various Americas have been found, but there are better ones perhaps to come. Columbus found only the shell of this country. Agassiz came along and discovered fossiliferous America. Silliman came and discovered geological America. Longfellow came and discovered poetic America. But there are other Americas yet to be found. Our resources have not all been tested. We have a land capable of supporting three thousand six hundred million of people.
We have just begun to open the outside door of this great underground vault in which nature holds its treasures, the copper, the zinc, the coal, the iron, the gold, the silver. If you have ever crossed the mountains to California you have some idea of it. The rail trains have only just begun to bring the harvests of the West down to our seaboard. The American fishermen have only just begun to cast their net on the right side of the ship. The dry-docks have just begun to set the keels and clamp the spars of our trading vessels.
What populations, what enterprises, what wealth, what civilization, what an advance from the time when under King Edward a man was put to death for burning coal and from the time when the House of Commons forbade the use of what was called the noxious fuels, and these days, when the long trains rush down from the mines and fill our coal-bins and gorge the furnaces of our ocean steamers. One hundred and sixty thousand square miles of coal-fields. Two fields of coal, one reaching from Illinois, down through Missouri, into Iowa, and the other from Pennsylvania down into Alabama, while side by side with these great coal-fields are the mines of iron; these two great giants, these two Titans of the earth, iron and coal, insuring perpetual wealth to the nation, standing side by side to help each other; the iron to excavate and pry up the coal, and the coal to smelt and forge and mould the iron’97eight hundred thousand tons of iron sent forth from the mines in one year in this country; thirty-two million tons of coal sent out from the mines of this country in a year. And all this only a prophecy of a larger yield when we shall come on with larger trains and more miners and stronger machinery to develop and to gather up, to transfer and to employ all this treasure. Make this calculation for yourselves, if you can make it: If England’92s coal-field, thirty-two miles long by eight miles wide, can keep, as it does, seventeen million six hundred thousand spindles at work in that small island, what may we not expect of our national industries when these one hundred and sixty thousand square miles of coal shall unite with one hundred and sixty thousand square miles of iron, both stretching themselves up to full height and strength’97two black, world-shaking giants.
Lift up thine eyes, oh, nation of God’92s right hand, at the glorious prospects. Build larger your barns for the harvests. Dig deeper the vats for the spoil of the vineyards, enlarge the warehouses for the merchandise. Multiply galleries of art for the pictures and statues. Advance, oh, nation of God’92s right hand. But remember that national wealth, if unsanctified, is sumptuous waste, is ruin, is debauchery, is magnificent woe, is splendid rottenness, is gilded death. Woe to us for the wine-vats if drunkenness wallows in them. Woe to us for the harvests if greed gathers them. Woe to us for the merchandise if avarice swallows it. Woe to us for the cities if misrule walks there. Woe to the land if God-defying crime debauches it. Our only safety is in more Bibles, more churches, more free schools, more consecrated men, more pure printing-presses, more of the glorious Gospel of the Son of God, that corrects all wrongs and is the source of all blessedness.
I congratulate you also on the fact that the manners and customs of society are improving. This is going to be a better world to live in. Take it all in all, it has vastly improved. I know that there are people who long for the good old times. They say, ’93Just think of the pride of people at this day! Just look at the ladies’92 hats, how big they are!’94 Why, there is nothing in the ladies’92 hats of today to equal the coalscuttle hats a hundred years ago. They say, ’93Just look at the way the people dress their hair!’94 Why, the extremest style of today will never equal the top-knots which our great-grandmothers rolled up with high combs that we would have thought would have made our great-grandfathers die with laughter. The hair was lifted into a pyramid a foot high. On the top of that tower lay a rosebud. Shoes of bespangled white kid and heels two or three inches high. Grandfather went out to meet her on the floor with coat of sky-blue silk and vest of white satin embroidered with gold lace, lace ruffles around his wrists and his hair falling in a queue. Oh, you modern hair-dressers, stand aghast at the locks of our ancestry!
They say our ministers are all askew, but just think of our clergymen entering the pulpit with their hair fixed up in the shape of one of the ancient bishops. The great George Washington had his horse’92s hoofs blackened when about to appear on parade, and wrote to Europe ordering sent for the use of himself and family one silver-laced hat, one pair of silver shoe-buckles, a coat made of fashionable silk, one pair of gold sleeve-buttons, six pairs of kid gloves, one dozen most fashionable cambric handkerchiefs, besides ruffles and tucker.
I once said to my father, an aged man: ’93Are people so much worse now than they used to be?’94 He made no answer for a minute, for the old people do not like to confess much to the boys. But after awhile his eye twinkled and he said: ’93Well, DeWitt, the fact is that people were never any better than they ought to be.’94
Talk about dissipations, ye who ever have seen the old-fashioned sideboard. Did not I have an old relative who always, when visitors came, used to go upstairs and take a drink, through economical habits, not offering anything to the visitors. Many of the fancy drinks of today were unknown to them; but their hard cider, mint julep, metheglin, hot toddy and lemonade, in which the lemon was not at all prominent, sometimes made lively work for the broad-brimmed hats and silver knee-buckles. Talk of dissipating parties of today and keeping of late hours. Why, did they not have their bees and sausage-stuffings and tea-parties and dances that for heartiness and uproar truly eclipsed all the waltzes, lances, and redowas and breakdowns of the nineteenth century, And they never went home till morning. And as to old-time courtships, Washington Irving describes them.
Talk about the dishonesties of today! Fifty years ago, the Governor of New York State had to disband the Legislature because of its utter corruption. Think of Aaron Burr, Vice-President of the United States and coming within one vote of being President. Think of the ministry having in it such men as Dean Swift and Sterne, their genius only equaled by their nastiness. Why, society was so much worse than it now is that I do not see how our fathers and mothers could have been induced to stay in it, although on our account I am glad they consented.
’93But,’94 say the deprecators of our time, ’93just think of the awful wars we have in these days, one half of the nation rising up to kill the other half.’94 Yet, there has been no war in modern times so ghastly as in the olden. Think of Austerlitz, where thirty thousand fell; of Fontenoy, where one hundred thousand fell; of Chalons, where three hundred thousand fell; of Marius’92s fight, in which two hundred and ninety thousand fell, and the tragedy at Herat, where Genghis Khan massacred one million six hundred thousand; of Neishar, where he slew one million seven hundred and forty-seven thousand, and the eighteen millions this monster slew in fourteen years as he went forth declaring his purpose of exterminating the entire Chinese nation and making the empire a pasture for cattle. Think of the death-throes of the five million men sacrificed in one campaign of Xerxes. Think of the one hundred and thirty thousand that perished in the siege of Ostend, of the three hundred thousand dead at Acre, of one million one hundred thousand dead at Jerusalem, of one million eight hundred and sixteen thousand dead at Troy. What may come of the threatened conflict on the other side the sea I know not, but up until the present time there has been no war compared with the wars of the ancients.
This Thanksgiving morning finds this land above all others in a position to be grateful. What are we coming to in abundance when I tell you that only a part of this continent yields anything? Now that the Northern Pacific Railroad is through, all our resources are to be multiplied inimitably. Mr. Dalrymple, in the Dakota Territory, has a farm of forty thousand acres; in harvest time he has one hundred and twenty reapers and binders going at the same time. The different divisions of his farm are connected by telephone; thirty steam threshing-machines, men in corps like an army, his farm one year yielding four hundred and thirty-two thousand bushels of wheat’97nine hundred carloads; the Grandon farm, twenty-five thousand acres; the Case farm, fifteen thousand acres; the Cheney, fifteen thousand acres; the Williams farm, fifteen thousand acres’97the product of all these regions only limited by the means of transportation to market. Our land enriched by a vast multitude of foreigners who came here, not the tramps or the tatterdemalions of other lands, but tens of thousands of them their best citizens. Let us this morning thank God for the prospects opening before this nation.
Oh, wheel into the ranks, all ye people! North, South, East, West; all decades, all centuries, all millenniums. Forward, the whole line! Huzza! Huzza!
Autor: T. De Witt Talmage