Our Achievements and Prospects
At the merging of the old and new eras, marked by events as plainly as by the calendar, it is the historian's duty to gather together the records of accomplished progress, and by their light forecast the probable direction of the great forces which are transforming the world we know into the marvellous cosmos our posterity will inherit. The retrospective reviews which follow contain the materials of which the history proper of our country will be made when it comes to be written in the fulness of time. The first article is Senator Depew's contribution to the work entitled "American Supremacy: Industrial; Commercial; Financial; by One Hundred American Writers."
OUR own country is peculiarly the pride of the nineteenth century. It has been the most complete example ever presented of the working out under favorable conditions of the principles and opportunities of civil and religious liberty. The marvellous development of the United States cannot be attributed solely or mainly to climate, to soil, to the virgin forests, or to unlimited and unoccupied territory. South America, Central America, and Mexico were as well, if not better, equipped in these respects. The garden of Eden, that fertile and fruitful portion of Asia, which for ages was the seat of empire, civilization, art, and letters, and for centuries the hive from which swarmed the conquerors of Europe, has returned to aboriginal conditions of desert and wilderness. Every industry whose growth is a feature of our progress is the expression and witness of the beneficent principles of our freedom and liberty of individual action.
The stories of battles and conquest, of the founding of dynasties and the dissolving of empires, of the sieges of cities and the subduing of peoples, which constitute the body of written history from the beginning of recorded time, are in ghastly contrast to the glorious, beneficent, and humanitarian picture of the achievements of the nineteenth century.
A philosopher has said that he is a benefactor of mankind who makes two blades of grass to grow where only one grew before. We celebrate harvests in inventions and discoveries where existed only Saharas. We find that the nineteenth century has not only added enormously to the productive power of the earth, but, in the happiness which has attended its creative genius, it has made the sunlight penetrate where the sunbeam was before unknown.
A little more than a hundred years ago the first cotton-mill was running with 250 spindles. Whitney invented the cotton-gin, which created the wealth of the Gulf States and made the cotton industry over all the world tributary to them. Other inventors improved the machinery, and the single mill of that period has expanded into 1,000, and the 250 spindles have increased to 21,000,000. In 1794 the first wool-carding machine was put in operation, mainly under the impulse of American invention. There were in 1895 2,500 wool manufactories. The production of textile fabrics in this country supports about 600,000 employes. At the beginning of the century a few thousand tons of iron were manufactured. In 1899 the United States produced over 13,000,000 tons of pig iron, being more than any other country; while in the manufactured products of iron and steel we are also in the advance of nations.
These astonishing figures give only the basic results of production, for from them collaterally flow car-building, the miracles of the sewing-machine, of the vast employment and earnings of machinery manufacturing, of building and building materials, of the manipulation and composition of other metals, as silver and gold and copper and brass, of the singularly rapid rise of American glass interests, of the incalculable demands made upon furnace and mill and shop for railway appliances, of the immense production of utensils useful in domestic life and in agriculture, of the great supplies of material comprehended under the name of dry-goods, and of the machinery required for the telegraph, the telephone, and the creation of electrical energy.
The twentieth century will be a truth-seeking century. The nineteenth has been one of experiment. Invention and discovery have made the last fifty years of the nineteenth century the most remarkable of recorded time. Nature has been forced to reveal her secrets, and they have been utilized for the service of man. Lightning drawn from the clouds, through the experiments of Franklin, has become the medium of instantaneous globe-circling communication through the genius of Morse, of telephonic conversation by the discoveries of Bell, and the element of illumination and motive power by the marvellous gifts of Edison. Steam, which Fulton utilized upon the water and Stephenson upon the land, has created the vast system of transportation which has given the stimulus to agriculture and manufacturing products by which millions of people have been enabled to live in comfort where thousands formerly dwelt in misery and poverty. The forces of destruction, or rather the powers of destruction, have been so developed that, while the nations of the earth are prepared for war as never before, the knowledge of its possibilities for the annihilation of life and property is so great that peace has been maintained among the great powers of Europe, and our war with Spain was shortened by the scientific perfection of weapons and the skill of those who used them. Physical progress and material prosperity have led to better living, broader education, higher thinking, more humane principles, larger liberty, and a better appreciation in preaching and in practice of the brotherhood of man over all the globe.