318. The Nation’s Opportunity

The Nation’92s Opportunity

Eze_41:11 : ’93Another door toward the south.’94

Rev_21:13. ’93On the south three gates.’94

King George of England, at the close of the Revolutionary War, in which he had lost thirteen colonies, proclaimed a day of thanksgiving because of the return of peace. His chaplain said to him: ’93For what would your majesty have us give thanks? for the fact that you have lost thirteen of the brightest jewels of your crown?’94 ’93No, not for that,’94 said the king. ’93Because we have added millions to our national debt?’94 ’93No, not for that,’94 said the king. ’93Because tens of thousands of people of the same race and religion have been destroyed?’94 ’93No, not for that,’94 said the king. ’93Why, then?’94 insisted the chaplain, ’93and for what shall we give thanks?’94 ’93Thank God,’94 said the king, with great vehemence, ’93thank God because matters are no worse.’94 And if the year now past has brought to any of you misfortune or calamity or bereavement, you have so many mercies left you ought to thank God things are no worse with you than they are.

But to vast throngs of us the year has been one of overarching mercy, and as individuals and as a church, and as a nation we keep jubliee. And would God that our habit of gratitude might become as fixed as that of St. Felix, the monk of Cantalice, who, on all occasions, whether stopping a fight or soliciting alms for the monastery, cried out, ’93Deo Gratias’94’97thanks be to God’97until the church called him ’93Brother Deo Gratias,’94 and the children hailed him on the streets as ’93Father Deo Gratias.’94 After a year in which other nations have felt the scourge of epidemic, but this land has been spared, and after emerging unhurt from a Presidential contest in which the blind Samson of partisanship threatened to pull down the pillars of State and to leave the temple flat in the dust, and after three hundred and sixty-five more days of kindness from our God, we are here.

In the graceful and splendid decorations of this church today, with the grains and fruits of all sections, we have an American congress of national products. Delegations from North, South, East, and West. Here are delegations with white hair from the cotton fields of the South. Here are those with auburn beard and locks from the golden wheat-fields of the North. Here are fruits that have in their round cheeks the blush of the setting sun of the West. Behold this moss from Southern woods, the bridal veil of the forest. Behold these plumes of pampas from the far West. Behold this rice from the Carolinas and these grapes and pears from California. Behold these apples from Connecticut, the ’93Land of Steady Habits.’94 Your father, perhaps, planted the tree. Behold these great banana trees standing sentinel at each end the platform, by last steamer from Florida, but the fruit this moment growing, and one of them in blossom of resplendent orb. Harvests of 1884 looking down upon all their predecessors. The wave of temporal blessing has dashed to the top of the nation’92s corn-crib. Ay, the prosperity of this country has rolled up until the crest of the wave has broken and recoiled upon itself. More corn and wheat and cotton and rice than we can find profitable market for. More manufactured goods than we can dispose of. The grain markets all glutted, and the factories by scores stopping, or run with only half the spindles harnessed, and wages are cut down in some places because the supply has swamped the demand; and nothing is the matter today with this country but over-production and under-consumption. Where there is work for ten there are twenty who offer their services, and the hundred thousand wheels of American industry are slowing up, not because there is too little, but because there is too much. God has snowed upon the track of this nation such vast accumulations of prosperity that the engine that draws the train can hardly plow through. The American nation is being choked to death with surplus of production and manufactures. Too much wheat, too much corn, too much cotton, too much fruit, too much hardware, too many dry-goods, too many shoes, too many carpets, too many philosophical instruments, too many printing-presses, too many cattle, too many sheep, too many artisans, too many merchants, too many lawyers, too many doctors, and from the large number of excellent men in my own profession without settlement, some might think, too many ministers.

The deluge of supply has risen fifteen cubits higher than the mountains of demand. The load of national wealth is so great that the team cannot draw it. The man who dies for lack of a crust of bread is no worse off than the man who is smothered to death in a wheat-bin. The nation suffers today, not from marasmus, but from plethora; not from consumption, but from threatened apoplexy.

What shall we do? ’93Let us rush right down to Washington and have the tariff changed,’94 says a great multitude. But put up the tariff as high as Tiptop House on Mount Washington, and while you might keep out foreign goods, we have enough mills of our own left to weave ten woollen shirts where there is one back to wear them, and make ten pairs of shoes for every ten feet that need them, and twenty curtains for every window that could support them, and twenty pairs of eyeglasses for every vision that might be re-enforced by them. Doctor the tariff with homoeopathic or allopathic or eclectic doses from now until the Thanksgiving Day of the year 2000, and you cannot in that way cure this chronic malady. Others hope by change of national administration to correct the trouble; but no President, though he had the combined patriotism of Washington and the broad views of Jefferson and the suavity of a Madison and the courage of an Andrew Jackson and the old-fashioned honesty of an Abraham Lincoln could regulate the inexorable law of supply and demand.

Well, some say, ’93Let us pack up our trunks and move east or north or west.’94 Going east towards Europe would be exodus into starvation. The avalanche of emigration shows us that those continents are overcrowded. We all know that this is the best country in all the world to live in. I have eight hundred and fifty thousand fresh reasons for saying so. Eight hundred and fifty thousand people in one year coming from other shores to live in America. If America had not been the best place to live, there would have been eight hundred and fifty thousand Americans going to Europe. Shall we go North? Already the busiest hives of competition are along the St. Lawrence and the Androscoggin and the Penobscot, and the voices of the woods of Maine and the forests of the lake chain answer: ’93No room here!’94 Shall we move West? There is no West. The emigrants chased it across the Ohio, across the Mississippi, across the La Platte and the Fremont exploring expedition put their spurs into the horses’92 flanks and chased the West from the Rocky Mountains to the Sierra Nevadas, and the Forty-niners from California, landing from the ships on the Pacific beach, attacked the West in the rear, and the workmen of the Union Pacific and Northern Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads came upon it with their spades, and the giant West has ceased; and though some might say of it, as was said in regard to Moses, ’93No man knoweth of his sepulcher to this day,’94 I think the Yosemite Valley is its sarcophagus, with El Capitan for the headstone and Cathedral Rock for the foot-stone. Millions of foreign population that are yet to cross the sea for America will soon enough fill all the area between Atlantic and Pacific beaches.

But in the words of my text, I now declare ’93another door toward the south’94’97’94on the south three gates.’94 When I say south I do not mean the Southern States of our own American Union, but I mean the magnificent infinity of opportunity beyond’97Portuguese America and fifteen Spanish-American republics and the islands of the South Pacific. Through that door will come the complete and glorious relief for all this over-supply. It will come, I think, within ten years, within five, within three. On the sixteenth of next month, at the New Orleans Exposition, that door will begin to swing open, and if the Government of the United States fully appreciates the opportunity, and the people of this country will help, the highest water mark that the wave of our national prosperity has ever reached will be one hundred feet under what shall speedily be the full tide of commercial, agricultural, manufacturing, literary, and moral success.

Our people for the most part sit in appalling ignorance of an opportunity such as was never spread out before any nation since the morning stars sang together. ’93On the south three gates’94’97ay, three thousand gates, and all of them wide open. I have had facts put before me enough to keep a man awake nights because of their significance. The simple fact is, that the vast realm of population in the tropics are buying from transatlantic nations almost everything, and from us almost nothing, and the tide ought to turn and the tide will turn, and I preach this sermon to help it turn. Your ears will tingle with the intensity of this recital: In 1880 five billion three hundred and sixty-nine million dollars worth of goods manufactured in the United States, and only two per cent. taken by foreign markets! Is it not a marvel that American manufactures are not as dead as the proverbial door-nail? My only wonder is, that nine-tenths of the manufacturers have not gone into bankruptcy, and ninety-nine one-hundredths of the factory hands have not gone into starvation or the almshouse; and it will be worse if the battle is to go on between Lowell spindles here and Manchester spindles there, between foreign merchants who want tariffs down and American merchants who want tariffs up. There is no relief for us in the markets of Europe, and there will be none until

Moons shall wax and wane no more.

’93Another door toward the south’94’97’94on the south three gates.’94 This nation today is like a silly dry-goods merchant who stands behind the counter haggling with a small customer about three yards of tape, when there are at the counter, impatiently waiting, three princesses wishing to purchase their bridal trousseaus. May God arouse this nation from its commercial idiocy! On the south of us are regions nearly three times as large as the United States without manufactories, without woollen goods, without agricultural implements, without telegraphs, without telephones, without shoes, without sewing-machines, without ten thousand things that we have and they must have. Not tens of thousands, but millions of consumers. Where shall they get their supplies? They are getting them from another hemisphere three thousand miles away, and we at their next door are buried under a surplus of those very things. They are able to trade with us for their sugars and coffees and spices and fruits and valuable woods and a thousand other commodities we need as much as they need our products. But look, and then hang your heads at the statement that, while our next-door neighbors, the southern republics and Brazil and neighboring colonies import six hundred and seventy-five million dollars worth of goods a year, only one hundred and twenty-six million dollars worth are from the United States’97one hundred and twenty-six million dollars out of six hundred and seventy-five million dollars’97only one-fifth of the trade ours. European nations taking their four fingers and leaving us the poor thumb. The sister republics on the American continent, with a foreign commerce amounting to four hundred and twenty-eight million dollars, trade with us to the feeble and paltry sum of sixty-three million dollars. There is nothing but a comparative ferry between this country and the West Indies, while there are raging seas and long voyages between them and other continents, yet they import one hundred and sixteen million dollars worth of goods, and only thirty-one million dollars worth come from us.

Now, all this I hope will be speedily changed, and it is going to be the solution of the labor question, of the bread question, of the communistic question, of the over-production and under-consumption question, and nearly all the other questions. It is going to set all the mills on the Merrimac and the Connecticut and the Susquehanna and the Chattahoochee and the Alabama running day and night with double set of hands, and calling for ten factories where we have one, and putting all the men who are now out of employ into work at good wages; and it is going to change this story of dull times into a prosperity which will roll on in full tide until the Mississippi loses its way to the Gulf of Mexico.

No more thankful am I for the past blessings to this nation that I am thankful to God for this opening opportunity, in its height stupendous and in its width hemispheric. How will it be done? Among other things, by such action as that which led our Congress to appropriate one million three hundred thousand dollars to the New Orleans Exposition, and led Mexico to appropriate two hundred thousand dollars, and New Orleans to appropriate five hundred thousand dollars. That exposition preceded by the Sydenham Crystal Palace, and the French and the Vienna and the Philadelphia expositions, yet in far-reaching significance more important than all of them put together. It is going to be the hinge of this century. Those other expositions showed chiefly what had already been done. This of next month will build a platform on which the nations of this American continent shall come up for introduction to a new commercial epoch in the history of the ages. On that platform will come up Bolivia, Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay, Venezuela, Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Brazil, and the brunette West Indies to meet the blonde and smiling United States. Hail! marriage of North and South. While the pessimists have been hunting up the burial service to read at the death of American commerce, and the stops of the organ were being pulled out for the Dead March in Saul, I, an optimist both by nature and by grace, take up in anticipation the bright-covered wedding liturgy, and as the blonde North takes the brunette South by the hand, saying, ’93With all my worldly goods, I thee endow,’94 I cry, ’93Whom God hath joined together let neither foreign despotism nor American demagogism ever put asunder.’94 Then let all the organs and choirs and orchestras make everything, from the Montreal ice palace to the halls of the Montezumas, quake under the rolling thunders of the grand march of North and South American progress.

This southern door will be further fastened open by the tides of travel diverted from Europe to the land of the Aztecs. Much of the one hundred and six million five hundred thousand dollars yearly expended by Americans in Europe will be expended in southern exploration, in looking at some of the ruins of the forty-seven cities which Stephens, the traveler, found only a little way apart, and walking through the corridors and under the arches and in the great doorways and over the miracles of mosaic and along by the monumental glories of another civilization; and ancient America will, with cold lips of stone, kiss the warm lips of modern America; and to have seen the Andes and Popocatepetl will be deemed as important as to have seen the Alpine and Balkan ranges. So there will be fewer people spoiled by foreign travel, and in our midst there will be less poor and nauseating imitation of the French shrug and the intentional hesitancy of a brainless foreign swell. The fact is, that there are more people made fools of by European travel than in any other way. And though sensible when they embark, they return with a collar and a cravat and a shoe and a coat and a pronunciation and a contempt for American institutions, and a bend of the elbow that makes one believe in evolution backward from man to ape! Of the thirty thousand Americans who now cross the sea annually, thousands will, on pleasure and business, visit the tropics, and so tourists and merchants and scientists and capitalists will all help in this national development.

I wish that somehow our next Congress might take the one hundred million dollars of surplus in the United States Treasury which the Republicans neglected to steal and before the Democrats get a chance to steal it, and in some way expend it in establishing new lines of shipping between the ports of North and South America and in dredging their harbors and in building telegraph lines and in the quickening of that glorious consummation which is sure to come. I want it to come very soon. I want it to come before there is any more suffering. I want it to come before there is any more sorrow.

In anticipation I nail on the front door of the nation an advertisement: Wanted, one hundred thousand men to build a South American railroad as long as from here to San Francisco. Wanted, five thousand telegraph operators. Wanted, twenty million dollars worth of dry-goods and hardware from New York city. Wanted, all the clocks you can make at New Haven and all the brains you can spare from Boston and all the bells you can mold at Troy and all the McCormick reapers you can fashion at Chicago and all the hams you can turn out at Cincinnati and all the railroad iron you can send from Boonton and Pittsburg. Wanted, wanted right away, wanted by express, wanted C. O. D., wanted by railroad train, wanted by steamer, wanted lawyers to plead our causes, wanted doctors to cure our sick, wanted ministers to evangelize our population, wanted professors to establish our universities.

Without this opening prospect this Thanksgiving Day would be dark for those of us who are interested in the laboring classes. To-day there are one million people out of work in this country’97ten per cent. of the laboring classes with nothing to do but suffer, and another twenty per cent. toiling on reduced wages. Can I, a minister of religion, stand in this place today, amid all these signs of prosperity and these great harvests, which have brought blessings to so many of our doors, and forget this fact? I cannot. I shall not take my seat at the Thanksgiving table with wife and children today, until I look at the bare plates of these multitudes, and at the empty wardrobes, and invoke upon them the mercy of God and the generous consideration of those in comfortable circumstances, and send from my own pocket my individual quota.

Congress will assemble next week, and let it waste no time in abstractions, but by some swift enactment open this door south, and all the other legitimate doors, for the relief of men who can get no work, and who stand in this cold November weather wringing their numb fingers, with their helpless families at their back. God help them! Hungry men and women never have been quiet and never will be quiet and never ought to be quiet. Bread they ought to have, bread they must have, and bread they will have. With this, the fifth plentiful harvest, if there be any man, woman, or child in America without food and without comfortable apparel and without shelter, there must be something awfully wrong.

May the suffering Christ, who once had not where to lay his head, champion the cause of the helpless, and smash the great monopolies that are built out of the bones and cemented with the blood of poor workmen, and send a supply this day from full pantries to every destitute home, and so change the condition of those hardly bested, that by the time another Thanksgiving Day arrives the poorest man in America may have upon his table a twenty-pound turkey, royally browned and basted and stuffed, put upon plates dashed with cranberry, and emptied only to make way for dessert of pumpkin pie such as New England matrons bake, or a more classic mince pie, such as our dear old mothers in New Jersey mixed with their own hands before those hands were folded in the last sleep, just before they entered upon the long Thanksgiving Day of heaven, and where we shall yet throw our arms around them and the other departed ones who used to be with us on Thanksgiving Day, and give them a rapturous hug and kiss all the heartier for the present painful separations. I no more believe in the Fatherhood of God than I do in the brotherhood of man. And for all the world may there be plenty to wear and plenty to eat. Amen and Amen!

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage