310. The Mission of the Wheel

The Mission of the Wheel

A Thanksgiving Sermon.

Eze_10:13 : ’93As for the wheels, it was cried unto them in my hearing, O wheel!’94

Next Thursday will, by proclamation of President and Governors, be observed in Thanksgiving for temporal mercies. With what spirit shall we enter upon it? For nearly a year and a half this nation has been celebrating the triumph of sword and gun and battery. We have sung martial airs and cheered returning heroes and sounded the requiem for the slain in battle. Methinks it will be a healthful change if this Thanksgiving week, in church and homestead, we celebrate the victories of peace: for nothing was done at Santiago or Manila that was of more importance than that which in the last year has been done in farmer’92s field, and mechanic’92s shop, and author’92s study, by those who never wore an epaulette or shot a Spaniard or went a hundred miles from their own door-sill. And now I call your attention to the wheel of the text.

Man, a small speck in the universe, was set down in a big world, high mountains rising before him, deep seas arresting his pathway, and wild beasts capable of his destruction; yet he was to conquer. It could not be by physical force, for, compare his arm with the ox’92s horn and the elephant’92s tusk, and how weak he is! It could not be by physical speed, for compare him to the antelope’92s foot and ptarmigan’92s wing, and how slow he is! It could not be by physical capacity to soar or plunge, for the condor beats him in one direction, and the porpoise in the other. Yet he was to conquer the world. Two eyes, two hands, and two feet were insufficient. He must be reinforced, so God sent the wheel.

Twenty-two times is the wheel mentioned in the Bible. Sometimes, as in Ezekiel, illustrating providential movement; sometimes, as in the Psalms, crushing the bad; sometimes, as in Judges, representing God’92s charioted progress. The wheel that started in Exodus, rolls on through Proverbs, through Isaiah, through Jeremiah, through Daniel, through Nahum, through the centuries’97all the time gathering momentum and splendor, until, seeing what it has done for the world’92s progress and happiness, we clap our hands in thanksgiving, and employ the apostrophe of the text, crying, ’93O Wheel!’94

I call on you in this Thanksgiving week to praise God for the triumphs of machinery, which have revolutionized the world and multiplied its attractions. Even Paradise, though very picturesque, must have been comparatively dull. Hardly anything going on. No agriculture needed, for the harvest was spontaneous. No architecture required, for they slept under the trees. No manufacturer’92s loom necessary for the weaving of apparel, for the fashions were exceedingly simple. To dress the garden could not have required ten minutes a day.

Having nothing to do, they got into mischief, and ruined themselves and the race. It was a sad thing to be turned out of Paradise, but, once turned out, a beneficent thing to be compelled to work. To help man up and on, God sent the wheel. If turned ahead, the race advances; if turned back, the race retreats. To arouse your gratitude and exalt your praise, I would show you what the wheel has done for the domestic world, for the agricultural world, for the traveling world, for the literary world. ’93As for the wheels, it was cried unto them in my hearing, O wheel!’94

In domestic life the wheel has wrought revolution. Behold the sewing machine! It has shattered the housewife’92s bondage and prolonged woman’92s life, and added immeasurable advantages. The needle for ages had punctured the eyes and pierced the side, and made terrible massacre. To prepare the garments of a whole household in the spring for summer and in the autumn for winter was an exhausting process. ’93Stitch! stitch! stitch!’94 Thomas Hood set it to poetry, but millions of persons have found it agonizing prose.

Slain by the sword, we buried the hero with ’93Dead March in Saul,’94 and flags half-mast. Slain by the needle, no one knew it but the household that watched her health giving way. The winter after that the children were ragged and cold and hungry, or in the almshouse. The hand that wielded the needle had forgotten its cunning. Soul and body had parted at the seam. The thimble had dropped from the palsied finger. The thread of life had snapped and let a suffering human life drop into the grave. The spool was all unwound. Her sepulchre was digged, not with sexton’92s spade, but with a sharper and shorter implement’97a needle. Federal and Confederate dead have ornamented graves at Arlington Heights and Richmond and Gettysburg, thousands by thousands; but it will take the archangel’92s trumpet to find the million graves of the vaster army of women needle-slain.

Besides all the sewing done for the household at home, there are hundreds of thousands of sewing women. The tragedy of the needle is the tragedy of hunger and cold and insult and homesickness and suicide’97five acts.

But I hear the rush of a wheel. Woman puts on the band and adjusts the instrument, puts her foot on the treadle and begins. Before the whirr and rattle, pleurisies, consumptions, headaches, backaches, heartaches are routed. The needle, once an oppressive tyrant, becomes a cheerful slave. Roll and rumble and roar until the family wardrobe is gathered, and winter is defied, and summer is welcomed, and the ardors and severities of the seasons are overcome. Winding the bobbin, threading the shuttle, tucking, quilting, ruffling, cording, embroidering, underbraiding set to music. Lock-stitch, twisted loop-stitch, crochet stitch, a fascinating ingenuity. All honor to the memory of Alsop and Duncan and Greenough and Singer and Wilson and Grover and Wilcox for their efforts to emancipate woman from the slavery of toil! But more than that, let there be monumental commemoration of Elias Howe, the inventor of the first complete sewing machine. What it has saved of sweat and tears God only can estimate. In the making of men’92s and boys’92 clothing in New York city in one year it saved seven million five hundred thousand dollars; and in Massachusetts, in the making of boots and shoes, in one year it saved seven million dollars.

No wonder that at some of the learned institutions, like the New Jersey State Normal School, and Rutgers’92 Female Institute, and Elmira Female College, acquaintance with the sewing-machine is a requisition, a young lady not being considered educated until she understands it. Winter is coming on, and the household must be warmly clad. The ’93Last Rose of Summer’94 will sound better played on a sewing-machine than on a piano. Roll on, O wheel of the sewing-machine! until the last shackled woman of toil shall be emancipated. Roll on!

Secondly, I look into the agricultural world to see what the wheel has accomplished. Look at the stalks of wheat and oats, the one bread for man, the other bread for horses. Coat off, and with a cradle made out of five or six fingers of wood and one of sharp steel, the harvester went across the field, stroke after stroke, perspiration rolling down forehead and cheek and chest, head blistered by the consuming sun, and lip parched by the merciless August air. At noon, the workmen lying half dead under the trees. The grain brought to the barn, the sheaves were unbound and spread on a threshing-floor, and two men with flails stood opposite each other hour after hour, and day after day, pounding the wheat out of the stalk. Two strokes, and then a cessation of sound. Thump! thump! thump! thump! thump! thump! Pounded once and then turned over to be pounded again. Slow, very slow. The hens cackled and clucked by the door, and picked up the loose grains, and the horses, half asleep and dozing over the mangers where the hay had been.

But, hark! to the buzz of wheels in the distance! The farmer has taken his throne on a reaper. He once walked, now he rides. Once worked with arm of flesh, now with arm of iron. He starts at the end of the wheat field, heads his horses to the opposite end of the field, rides on. At the stroke of his iron chariot the gold of the grain is surrendered; the machine rolling this way and rolling that, this way and that, until the work which would have been accomplished in many days is accomplished in a few hours. The grain field prostrate before the harvesters.

What quick, clean work the wheel of the reaper does make! Soon after, the horses are fastened to the threshing-machine back of the barn. The iron-toothed cylinders are ready for their prey. The horses start, the unbound wheat is plunged into the vortex, and the broken straw is in one place, and the pure St. Louis wheat is in another place. The driving-wheel strapped, the cylinder humming with terrible velocity, the inexperienced warned off for fear of accident, the ground aquake with the mighty revolution, I stand in awe and thanksgiving at the agricultural conquest, and cry out with the text, ’93O, wheel!’94

Can you imagine anything more beautiful than the Sea Island cotton? I take up the unmelted snow in my hand. How beautiful it is! But do you know by what painstaking and tedious toil it passed into anything like practicality? If you examined that cotton you would find it full of seeds. It was a severe process by which the seed was to be extracted from the fibre. Vast populations were leaving the South because they could not make any living out of this product. One pound of green seed-cotton was all that a man could prepare in one day; but Eli Whitney, a Massachusetts Yankee, woke up, got a handful of cotton, and went to constructing a wheel for the parting of the fibre and the seed. Teeth on cylinders, brushes on cylinders, wheels on wheels. South Carolina gave him fifty thousand dollars for his invention, and instead of one man taking a whole day to prepare a pound of cotton for the market, now he may prepare three hundred weight, and the South is enriched, and the commerce of the world is revolutionized, and over eight million bales of cotton were prepared this year, enough to keep at work in this country fourteen million three hundred thousand spindles, employing two hundred and seventy thousand hands, and enlisting two hundred and eighty-one million four hundred thousand dollars of capital.

Thank you, Eli Whitney, and L. S. Chichester, of New York, his successor. Above all, thank God for their inventive genius, that has done so much for the prosperity of the world. When I see coming forth from this cotton production and cotton manufacture enough cloth to cover the tables of a nation, and enough spool thread to sew every rent garment, and enough hosiery to warm the nation’92s feet, and enough cordage to fly the sails of all the shipping, and enough wadding to supply the guns of all the American sportsmen, and enough twine to fly all the kites outside of Wall street, and enough tape to tie up all the briefs of all the attorneys, and enough flannels to blanket a slumbering world, I thank God.

For the fifty thousand dollars received for his cotton-gin, Whitney gave a wealth that makes the word ’93millions’94 imbecile. Strange that one machine should work such marvels. Have you noticed the construction of the cotton-gin? On one side of it I count three wheels, and on another side I count three wheels, while on the third side there is a wheel on top of a wheel, and the salutation of the text bursts from my lips, while I cry in ecstasy, and admiration of gratitude, ’93O wheel!’94

Thirdly, I look to see what the wheel has done for the traveling world. No one can tell how many noble and self-sacrificing inventors have been crushed between the coach-wheel and the modern locomotive, between the paddle and the ocean steamer.

I will not enter into the controversy as to whether John Fitch, or Robert Fulton, or Thomas Somerset was the inventor of the steam engine. They all suffered and were martyrs of the wheel, and they shall all be honored. John Fitch wrote:

’93The 21st of January, 1743, was the fatal time of bringing me into existence. I know of nothing so perplexing and vexatious to a man of feeling as a turbulent wife and steamboat building. I experienced the former and quit in season, and had I been in my right senses I should undoubtedly have treated the latter in the same manner; but for one man to be teased with both, he must be looked upon as the most unfortunate man in the world.’94

Surely John Fitch was in a bad predicament. If the steamboat boiler did not blow him up, his wife would! In all ages there are those to prophesy the failure of any useful invention. You do not know what the inventors of the day suffer. When it was proposed to light London with gas, Sir Humphrey Davy, the great philosopher, said that he should as soon think of cutting a slice from the moon and setting it upon a pole to light the city. Through all abuse and caricature Fitch and Fulton went until yonder the wheel is in motion, and the Clermont, the first steamboat, is going up the North river, running the distance’97hold your breath while I tell you’97from New York to Albany in thirty-two hours. But the steamboat wheel multiplied its velocities until the Lucania of the Cunard, and the Majestic of the White Star line, and the New York of the American line, and the Kaiser Wilhelm of the North German Lloyd line cross the Atlantic ocean in six days or less. Communication between the two countries is so rapid and so constant, that whereas once those who had been to Europe took on airs for the rest of their mortal lives’97and to me for many years the most disagreeable man I could meet was the man who had been to Europe, despising all American pictures and American music and American society, because he had seen European pictures and heard European music and mingled in European society’97now a transatlantic voyage is so common that a sensible man would no more boast of it than if he had been to New York or Boston.

All the rivers and lakes and seas have turned white with rage under the smiting of the steamboat wheel. In the phosphorescent wake of it sail the world’92s commercial prosperities. Through the axle of that wheel nations join hands, and America says to Venice: ’93Give me your pictures’94; and to France, ’93Give me your graceful apparel’94; and to England, ’93Give me your Sheffield knives and Nottingham laces and Manchester goods, and I will give you breadstuffs, corn and rye and rice. I will give you cotton for your mills; I will give you cattle for your slaughter-houses. Give me all you have to spare and I will give you all I have to spare,’94 and trans-Atlantic and cis-Atlantic nations grasp each other’92s hands in brotherhood.

What a difference between John Fitch’92s steamboat, sixty feet long, and the Oceanic, seven hundred and four feet long! The ocean wheel turns swifter and swifter, filling up the distance between the hemispheres, and hastening the time spoken of in the Book of Revelation, when there shall be no more sea.

While this has been doing on the water, James Watts’92 wheel has done as much on the land. How well I remember Sanderson’92s stage-coach, running from New Brunswick to Easton, as he drove through Somerville, New Jersey, turning up to the post-office and dropping the mail-bags with ten letters and two or three newspapers; on the box, Sanderson, himself, six feet two inches, and well proportioned, long lash-whip in his hand, the reins of six horses in the other, the ’93leaders’94 lathered along the lines of the traces, foam dripping from the bits. It was the event of the day when the stage came. It was our highest ambition to become a stage-driver. Some of the boys climbed on the great leathern boot of the stage, and those of us who could not get on shouted ’93Cut behind!’94 I saw the old stage-driver not long ago, and I expressed to him my surprise that one around whose head I had seen a halo of glory in my boyhood time was only a man like the rest of us. Between Sanderson’92s stage-coach and a Chicago express train, what a difference! All the great cities of the nation strung on an iron thread of railways!

At Doncaster, England, I saw George Stephenson’92s first locomotive. If in good repair it could run yet, but because of its make and size it would be the burlesque of all railroaders. Between that rude machine, crawling down the iron track, followed by a clumsy and bouncing train, and one of our Rocky Mountain locomotives, with a village of palace-cars, becoming drawing-rooms by day and princely dormitories by night, what bewitching progress!

See the train move out from one of our great depots for a thousand miles’92 journey! All aboard. Tickets clipped and baggage checked, and porters attentive to every want. Under tunnels dripping with dampness that never saw the light. Along ledges where an inch off the track would be the difference between a hundred men living and a hundred dead. Full head of steam, and two men in the locomotive charged with all the responsibility of whistle and Westinghouse brake. Clank, clank! go the wheels. Clank, clank! echo the rocks. Small villages only hear the thunder and see the whirlwind as the train shoots past. A city on the wing! Thrilling, startling, sublime, magnificent spectacle’97a rail train in lightning procession.

When, years ago, the railroad men ’93struck’94 for wages our country was threatened with annihilation, and we realized what the railroad wheel had done for this country. Over one hundred and eighty thousand miles of railroad in the United States. In one year over a billion dollars received from passengers and freight. White Mountains, Alleghany Mountains, Rocky Mountains, Sierra Nevadas bowing to the iron yoke. All the rolling stock of New York Central, Erie, Pennsylvania, Michigan Central, Georgia, Great Southern, Union Pacific, and all the other wheels of the tens of thousands of freight cars, wrecking cars, cabooses, drawing-room cars, sleeping cars, passenger cars, of all the accommodation, express and special trains, started by the wheel of the grotesque locomotive that I saw at Doncaster. For what it has done for all Christendom, I ejaculate in the language of the text, ’93O wheel!’94

While the world has been rolling on the eight wheels of the rail car, or the four wheels of the carriage, or the two wheels of the gig, it was not until 1876, at the Centennial Exposition, at Philadelphia, that the miracle of the nineteenth century rolled in’97the bicycle. The world could not believe its own eyes, and not until quite far on in the eighties were the continents enchanted with the whirling, flashing, dominating spectacle of a machine that was to do so much for the pleasure, the business, the health, and the profit of nations. The world had needed it for six thousand years. Man’92s slowness of locomotion was a mystery. Was it of more importance that the reindeer or the eagle rapidly exchanged jungles or crags than that man should get swiftly from place to place? Was the business of the bird or the roebuck more urgent than that of the incarnated immortal? No! At last we have the obliteration of distances by pneumatic tire. At last we have wings. And what has this invention done for woman? The cynics and constitutional growlers would deny her this emancipation, and say: ’93What better exercise can she have than a, broom, or a duster, or a churn, or rocking a cradle, or running up and down stairs, or a walk to church with a prayer book under her arm?’94 And they rather rejoice to find her disabled with broken pedal or punctured tire half way out to Chevy Chase or Coney Island. But all sensible people who know the tonic of fresh air, and the health in deep respiration, and the awakening of disused muscles, and the exhilaration of velocity, will rejoice that wife, and mother, and daughter, may have this new recreation. Indeed, life to so many is a hard grind that I am glad at the arrival of any new mode of healthful recreation. We need have no anxiety about this invasion of the world’92s stupidity by the vivacious, and laughing, and jubilant wheel, except that we always want it to roll in the right direction’97toward place of business, toward good recreation, toward philanthropy, toward usefulness, toward places of divine worship, and never toward immorality or Sabbath desecration. My friend, Will Carleton, the poet, said what I like when he wrote of this new velocity:

We claim a great utility that daily must increase;

We claim from inactivity a sensible release;

A constant mental, physical, and moral help, we feel,

That bids us turn enthusiast, and cry, God bless the wheel!

Never yet having mounted one of those rolling wonders, I stand by the wayside, far enough off to avoid being run over, and in amazement and congratulation cry out, in Ezekiel’92s phraseology of the text, ’93O wheel!’94

Fourthly, I look into the literary world and see what the wheel has accomplished. I am more astounded with this than anything that has preceded. Behold the almost miraculous printing-press. Do you not feel the ground shake with the machinery of the New York, Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, and Western dailies? Some of us remember when the hand ink-roller was run over the cylinder, and by great haste eight hundred copies of the village newspaper were issued in one day and no lives lost; but invention has crowded invention, and wheel jostled wheel, stereotyping, electrotyping, taking their places, Benjamin Franklin’92s press giving way to the Lord Stanhope press; and the Washington press, and the Victory press, and the Hoe perfecting press have been set up. Together with the newspaper come the publication of innumerable books of history, of poetry, of romance, of art, of travel, of biography, of religion, dictionaries, encylopedias, and bibles. Some of these presses send forth the most accursed stuff, but the good predominates. Turn on with wider sweep and greater velocity, O wheel! Wheel of light, wheel of civilization, wheel of Christianity, wheel of divine momentum.

On those four wheels’97that of the sewing-machine, that of the reaper, that of travel, that of the printing-press’97the world has moved up to its present prosperity. I call on you to thank God for the triumphs of machinery as seen in our home comforts and added national grandeur.

And now I gather on an imaginary platform, as I literally did gather them on Thanksgiving days when I preached in Brooklyn, specimens of our American products. Here is corn from the West, a foretaste of the great harvest that is to come down to our seaboard; enough for ourselves and for foreign shipment. Here is rice from the South, never a more beautiful product grown on the planet, mingling the gold and green. Here are two sheaves, a sheaf of Northern wheat and a sheaf of Southern rice bound together. May the band never break! Here is cotton, the wealthiest product of America. Here is sugar-cane, enough to sweeten the beverages of an empire. Who would think that out of such a homely stalk there would come such a luscious product. Here are palmetto trees that have in their pulses the warmth of Southern climes. Here is the cactus of the South, so beautiful and so tempting it must go armed. Here are the products of American mines. This is iron, this is coal’97the iron representing a vast yield, our country sending forth one year eight hundred thousand tons of it; the coal representing a hundred and sixty thousand square miles of it’97the iron prying out the coal, the coal smelting the iron. This is silver, silver from Colorado and Nevada’97those places able yet to yield silver napkin-rings, and silver knives, and silver castors, and silver platters for all our people. Here is mica from the quarries of New Hampshire. How beautiful it looks in the sunlight! Here is copper from Lake Superior, so heavy I dare not lift it. Here is gold from Virginia and Georgia. Here are apples, making you think of the long winter nights of your boyhood, when the neighbors came in, and you had apples and hickory nuts and cider. Here is corn from New Jersey. State of Theodore Frelinghuysen and William L. Dayton and Samuel L. Southard’97the State of New Jersey, sometimes caricatured by people who are mad because they were not fortunate enough to have been born there! Here are lemons and oranges. Here are bananas from Florida. What a magnificent growth this is! What a leaf! implying shadow, comfort and refuge.

I look around me on this imaginary platform, and it seems as if the waves of agricultural, mineralogical, pomological wealth dash to the platform, and there are four beautiful beings that walk in, and they are all garlanded. And one is garlanded with wheat and blossoms of snow, and I find she is the North. And another comes in, and her brow is garlanded with rice and blossoms of magnolia, and I find she is the South. And another comes in, and I find she is garlanded with seaweed and blossoms of spray, and I find she is the East. And another comes in, and I find she is garlanded with silk of corn and radiant with California gold, and I find she is the West. And coming face to face, they take off their garlands, and they twist them together into something that looks like a wreath, but it is a wheel, the wheel of national prosperity, and I say in an outburst of Thanksgiving joy for what God has done for the North and the South and the East and the West, ’93O wheel!’94

At different times in Europe they have tried to get a Congress of kings at Berlin, or at Paris, or at St. Petersburg; but it has always been a failure. Only a few kings have come. But on this imaginary platform that I have built we have a convention of all the kings’97King Corn, King Cotton, King Rice, King Wheat, King Oats, King Iron, King Coal, King Silver, King Gold, and they all bow before the King of Kings, to whom be all the glory of this year’92s wonderful production.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage