OUR DAY

VOL. IX.-DECEMBER, 1892.-No. 60.

THE CAREER OF COLUMBUS-ITS

CONSEQUENCES.

CAUSES AND

ORATION BY CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW AT THE DEDICATION OF THE WORLD'S FAIR BUILDINGS IN CHICAGO,

OCTOBER 21, 1892.

This day belongs not to America, but to the world. The results of the event it commemorates are the heritage of the peoples of every race and clime. We celebrate the emancipation of man. The preparation was the work of almost countless centuries; the realization was the revelation of one. The cross on Calvary was hope; the cross raised on San Salvador was opportunity. But for the first, Columbus would never have sailed; but for the second, there could have been no place for the planting, the nurture and the expansion of civil and religious liberty. Ancient history is a dreary record of unstable civilizations. Each reached its zenith of material splendor and perished. The Assyrian, Persian, Egyptian, Grecian and Roman empires were proofs of the possibilities and limitations of man for conquest and intellectual developTheir destruction involved a sum of misery and relapse which made their creation rather a curse than a blessing. Force was the factor in the government of the world when Christ was born, and force was the sole source and exercise of authority both for Church and State when Columbus sailed from Palos. The wise men traveled from the East toward the West under the guidance of the Star of Bethlehem. The spirit of the equality of all men before God and the law moved westward from Calvary with its revolutionary influence upon old institutions to the Atlantic Ocean. Columbus car

ment.

ried it westward across the seas. The emigrants from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, from Germany and Holland, from Sweden and Denmark, from France and Italy, have, under its guidance and inspiration, moved east and again west, building states and founding cities until the Pacific limited their march. The exhibition of arts and sciences, of industries and inventions, of education and civilization, which the Republic of the United States will here present, and to which, through its Chief Magistrate, it invites all nations, condenses and displays the flower and fruitage of this transcendent miracle.

The anarchy and chaos which followed the breaking up of the Roman Empire necessarily produced the feudal system. The people, preferring slavery to annihilation by robber chiefs, became the vassals of territorial lords. The reign of physical force is one of perpetual struggle for the mastery. Power which rests upon the sword neither shares nor limits its authority. The king destroyed the lords, and the monarchy succeeded feudalism. Neither of these institutions considered or consulted the people. They had no part but to suffer or die, in this mighty strife of masters for the mastery. But the throne, by its broader view and greater resources, made possible the construction of the highways of freedom. Under its banner races could unite and petty principalities be merged, law substituted for brute force, and right for might. It founded and endowed universities, and encouraged commerce. It conceded no political privileges, but unconsciously prepared its subjects to demand them.

Absolutism in the State and bigoted intolerance in the Church shackled popular unrest, and imprisoned thought and enterprise in the fifteenth century. The divine right of kings stamped out the faintest glimmer of revolt against tyranny; and the problems of science, whether of the skies or of the earth, whether of astronomy or geography, were solved or submerged by ecclesiastical decrees. The dungeon was ready for the philosopher who proclaimed the truths of the solar system, or the navigator who would prove the sphericity of the earth. An English Gladstone, or a French Gambetta, or

a German Bismarck, or an Italian Garibaldi, or a Spanish Castelar, would have been thought monsters, and their deaths at the stake, or on the scaffold, and under the anathemas of the Church, would have received the praise and approval of kings and nobles, of priests and peoples. Reason had no seat in spiritual or temporal realms. Punishment was the incentive to patriotism, and piety was held possible by torture. Confessions of faith extorted from the writhing victim on the rack were believed efficacious in saving his soul from fires eternal beyond the grave. For all that humanity to-day cherishes as its best heritage and choicest gifts, there was neither thought nor hope.

Fifty years before Columbus sailed from Palos, Guttenberg and Faust had forged the hammer which was to break the bonds of superstition and open the prison doors of the mind. They had invented the printing press and movable types. The prior adoption of a cheap process for the manufacture of paper at once utilized the press. Its first service, like all its succeeding efforts, was for the people. The universities and the schoolmen, the privileged and the learned few of that age, were longing for the revelation and preservation of the classic treasures of antiquity, hidden and yet insecure in monastic cells and libraries. But the firstborn of the marvelous creation of these primitive printers of Mayence was the printed Bible. The priceless contributions of Greece and Rome to the intellectual training and development of the modern world came afterward through the same wondrous machine. The force, however, which made possible America, and its reflex influence upon Europe, was the open Bible by the family fireside. And yet neither the enlightenment of the new learning nor the dynamic power of the spiritual awakening could break through the crust of caste which had been forming for centuries. Church and State had so firmly and dexterously interwoven the bars of privilege and authority that liberty was impossible from within. Its piercing light and fervent heat must penetrate from without.

Civil and religious freedom are founded upon the individual and his independence, his worth, his rights and his equal

status and opportunity. For his planting and development, a new land must be found, where with limitless areas for expansion, the avenues of progress would have no bars of custom or heredity, of social orders, or privileged classes. The time had come for the emancipation of the mind and soul of humanity. The factors wanting for its fulfillment were the new world and its discoverer.

God always has in training some commanding genius for the control of great crises in the affairs of nations and peoples. The number of these leaders are less than the centuries, but their lives are the history of human progress. Though Cæsar and Charlemagne, and Hildebrand, and Luther, and William the Conqueror, and Oliver Cromwell, and all the epoch makers prepared Europe for the event, and contributed to the result, the lights which illumine our firmament to-day are Columbus the discoverer, Washington the founder, and Lincoln the saviour.

THE PICTURE OF THE DISCOVERER.

Neither realism nor romance furnishes a more striking and picturesque figure than that of Christopher Columbus. The mystery about his origin heightens the charm of his story. That he came from among the toilers of his time is in harmony with the struggles of our period. Forty-four authentic portraits of him have descended to us, and no two of them are the counterfeits of the same person. Each represents a character as distinct as its canvas. Strength and weakness, intellectuality and stupidity, high moral purpose and brutal ferocity, purity and licentiousness, the dreamer and the miser, the pirate and the Puritan, are the types from which we may select our hero. We dismiss the painter, and piercing with the clarified vision of the dawn of the twentieth century the veil of four hundred years, we construct our Columbus.

The perils of the sea in his youth upon the rich argosies of Genoa, or in the service of the licensed rovers who made them their prey, had developed a skillful navigator and intrepid mariner. They had given him a glimpse of the possibilities of the unknown beyond the highways of travel, which

roused an unquenchable thirst for adventure and research. The study of the narratives of previous explorers and diligent questionings of the daring spirits who had ventured far toward the fabled West, gradually evolved a theory, which became in his mind so fixed a fact that he could inspire others with his own passionate beliefs. The words, "that is a lie," written by him on the margin of nearly every page of a volume of the travels of Marco Polo, which is still to be found in a Genoese library, illustrate the skepticism of his beginning, and the first vision of the New World the fulfillment of his faith.

To secure the means to test the truth of his speculations this poor and unknown dreamer must win the support of kings and overcome the hostility of the Church. He never doubted his ability to do both, though he knew of no man living who was so great in power, or lineage, or learning that he could accomplish either. Unaided and alone he succeeded in arousing the jealousies of sovereigns and dividing the, councils of ecclesiastics. "I will command your fleet and discover for you new realms, but only on condition that you confer on me hereditary nobility, the Admiralty of the Ocean, and the Vice-Royalty and one-tenth the revenues of the New World,” were his haughty terms to King John of Portugal. After ten years of disappointment and poverty, subsisting most of the time upon the charity of the enlightened monk of the Convent of Rabida, who was his unfaltering friend, he stood before the throne of Ferdinand and Isabella, and rising to inperial dignity in his rags, embodied the same royal conditions in his petition. The capture of Granada, the expulsion of Islam from Europe, and the triumph of the Cross aroused the admiration and devotion of Christendom. But this proud beggar, holding in his grasp the potential promise and dominion of El Dorado and Cathay, divided with the Moslem surrender the attention of sovereigns and of bishops. France and England indicated a desire to hear his theories and see his maps while he was still a suppliant at the gates of the camp of Castile and Aragon, the sport of its courtiers and the scoff of its confessors. His unshakable faith that Christopher Columbus was commissioned from heaven, both by his