A Reply To Senator Farwell, Of Illinois.
I am invited by the management of THE COSMOPOLITAN to reply to an article recently published in that journal by the Honorable Charles B. Farwell, United States Senator from Illinois, advocating the claims of Chicago to the proposed Columbus Exhibition. In presenting a few points in favor of New York, I wish to begin by declaring myself cordially of the honorable Senator’s opinion that the emulation between the two cities should be conducted without bitterness or partisanship, and only in a spirit of broad and liberal rivalry.
The nine pages occupied by the Senator are more than half taken up with illustrations of streets and parks and monuments; and, of the text, the greater portion is culled from the note-books of travelers and writers, for which, since he adopts them, he is responsible equally with any part of his argument. Less than one-quarter of the nine pages is covered by his own words—as though he had found difficulty in employing his pen to divert a momentous and historic celebration from the metropolis of America to a provincial city. Those of his sentences which are not borrowed embody three propositions in support of the claims of Chicago:
First, that it is easy of access to farmers.
Second, that it is the choice of lumbermen, iron men, and machinists.
Third, that several previous exhibitions having been held in the East and South, it is now the turn of the West.
The Senator dismisses very lightly the advantages to be derived from the maritime position of New York, and his argument is interesting, in that it reveals the scope of the celebration he has in mind, and marks it as a National, and not an International, Exhibition. He thinks the first and last consideration should be the convenience of our Western population. The ratio of foreign visitors and exhibitors would, in his opinion, be small, and doubtless this anticipation will be sustained if Congress decides upon an in-land location. The Senator proceeds to fasten upon his conception of the Columbus Fair a distinctively agricultural character. It is the interest of the stockbreeders that chiefly appeals to him, and he designates the products of the farm as first entitled to the best opportunity for display. One readily hears in his utterance the voice of Illinois, when he claims the Exhibition because the Secretary of Agriculture pronounces Chicago “the center of the greatest agricultural and stock-raising region on earth;” and the solemnity of the Senator’s discourse is relieved by the incidental factiousness of the declaration that an Eastern man should visit Chicago annually, to be “inoculated with unrepressed enthusiasm.”
New York will with difficulty concede the things he so easily takes for granted. Our geographical situation is not to be disposed of in the careless sentence of a magazine article. If the Senator will turn from the map of Illinois to the map of the United States, he will observe that New York is the point from which all lines radiate. We communicate eastward with Boston and New England, and northward with Montreal and Canada. Westward stretch the Great Pacific roads to California. Through New Jersey run railways that spread all over the Gulf States from Florida to Texas. And seaward come to us the ships of all countries—from Europe, and from the Orient, and from the South Sea. New York is the point of contact between America and the nations of the earth. It stands in the gateway between the New World and the Old. It is the place to which three-fourths of our commerce is drawn, to which the traveler visiting this hemisphere directs his course, and which, in the thoughts and writings of foreign communities, be they of high or low degree, stands as the type and center and head of everything pre-eminently American.
The Senator from Illinois differs, however, with the majority, and quotes a statement that “Chicago is the one purely and distinctively American city on this continent.” In what, then, does it differ from the others? Is Lancaster more English than York, or Calais more French than Lyons? Or how is Chicago more distinctively American than St. Louis? Seventy-five years ago the site of Chicago was wilderness as silent as Manhattan Island when Hudson first beheld it. Like San Francisco, its wealth came in a few years of sudden prosperity. Like Boston, it rose superbly from its ashes. Like all the rest of us, its splendor is of recent growth—more recent, indeed, than that of any other.
The Senator further advances the architectural magnificence of Chicago’s private residences as a logical reason for placing the great Exhibition within their aureole. Chicago is “the London of America,” possessing “metropolitan imperialism,” and worthy of the designation of “the young giant of the fairest.” Its houses, he declares, are “palaces.” We know them well, those palaces, all of which were built with borrowed money, and most of which, today, are mortgaged from corner-stone to skylight. We know them well, those palaces, where every sign of wealth abounds, and where the front door is opened by a housemaid. We know them well, those palaces, whose occupants are “all out on their doorsteps,” as they used to sit in New York seventy years ago, when our “palaces” were built on twenty-five-foot-front lots, and when social life was primitive in the extreme.
We, in New York, conceive the significance of this Exhibition to be something loftier than lumber, iron, and live-stock. We have not in mind the agricultural show the Senator meditates. We aim to make it an historic exemplar of the last four centuries—to illustrate what has been achieved in civilization since the discovery of America. And as that discovery led on to still vaster explorations, to the Horn and the Cape route, and through all Chinese walls of Asiatic intolerance, and northward toward the frozen Pole, and southward across the forests of Africa, so would we bring to this Exhibition, by all routes, and from the remotest barbarism as from the most accomplished civilization, the distinctive and characteristic feature of each.
When Columbus steered from Palos, he launched, half consciously, the entire human race upon an intellectual sea whose ultimate shores have not yet been explored. Behind the star-guided track of his vessels lay the ignorance, the feudalism, the bigotry of the Middle Ages; before him, unseen by the material eye, but divined, we may believe, by his spiritual vision, stretched realms of advancement and discovery in strange and marvelous paths of learning. His achievement aroused the minds of men from the torpor of dark and centuries, and liberated human thought, and awoke the genius of invention, and prepared the way for religious toleration, and led to emancipation from the absolute rule of kings. These are the greatest benefits that have ever blessed the race, and these thoughts underlie the material progress which is their natural exponent. From them sprang literature and exquisite refinement in every art, and the triumphs of science, that fill this age with marvels as wondrous as the visions and dreams of the alchemists of old.
If the Columbus Exhibition be merely an ordinary display of products and manufactures, it will fail of that suggestive meaning from which it should derive its profoundest import, its grandest purpose, and one far beyond mere material prosperity, should be to mark the progress made in the civilization of mankind since the discovery of this continent to the present day. In that year, 1892, we should gauge the human intellect by its achievements of the last four hundred years. This Exhibition should display the advance made by every country in the chief spheres of thought and labor that have liberated and instructed and ennobled the human race. It should compare the fifteenth with the nineteenth century. It should contrast the impotent mechanism of the past with the marvels of beauty and power and delicacy of the present. It should stigmatize view of the mighty steamships that cross and recross the ocean, the caravel of medieval Italy, the galleon of ancient Spain, the pinnace of Raleigh, the Hail Moon yacht of Hendrick Hudson. It should place beside the pictured missals of monkish cloisters the printing-press that distributes each day’s news from every part of the world. Beside the post-chaise of NEW YORK’S CANDIDACY FOR THE WORLD’S FAIR OF 1892. 167 Franklin’s day, which carried the mails in six weeks from Boston to Philadelphia, should stand one of the locomotives that flies a train in six days from ocean to ocean. It should lay the wooden lettertype, which was the mechanical marvel of the time of Columbus, with the electrical appliances which are the wonder of our own. Within it should be gathered types of life and industry from every section of the Union. Within it should be seen the homes familiar to every part of this continent, and recalling every age—the Southern plantation, the backwoodsman’s cabin, the Puritan’s house of the seven gables, the gold-miner’s camp, the Canadian trapper’s lodge, the Dutch cottage of Diedrich Knickerbocker, the wigwam of the Iroquois, the Californian adobe, the ice hut of the Esquimaux, and hack even to the semblance of the mound-builder’s enclosure. To such an Exhibition should be brought representatives from every tribe and nation of the inhabited globe. And from some such gathering as this men might study the possibilities of the future by the teaching of the past. In looking back across the strifes and follies and crimes of olden times, they could meditate the great lesson of the comity and forbearance of one nation toward another, and seek ways of more perfect justice, and study the paths of wisdom and moderation.
For over a century New York has held not merely a material, but an historic, supremacy. The history of New York, more than that of any other city, is the history of the progress and development of the whole country. In it George Washington was inaugurated. At the close of the Revolutionary War it was chosen to be the first capital of the infant nation. In population, in wealth, in manufactures, in public works, in commercial relations, it is the capital of the Union today. Chicago is an inland city, far from the touch of foreign countries, surrounded by its lumber, iron, and livestock, and unknown to Europeans, except for a quizzical curiosity which its extraordinary growth inspires; and from that circumstance that they read of it as a refuge for their own political outcasts, who go thither, not as inhabitants, but as incendiaries, to establish in it their socialistic fraternities, to manufacture anarchist bombs, and to hiss the American flag in public.
To render the Columbus Exhibition successful it is indispensable that the interest of foreign lands be enlisted. Does the Senator think it nothing to ask French and English manufacturers to send rare and costly and perishable wares across the Atlantic? Does he think such exhibits will be augmented in number and value by adding to the sea voyage the risk and delay and expense of land transportation? Bearing in mind the relatively small exhibits sent by England and France to Vienna, by reason of the inconveniences of transportation, will they be more likely to send to Chicago? Is it not evident that the bulk of exhibits sent to the shore of Lake Michigan would be infinitely less than that sent thirteen years ago to Philadelphia, beside the ocean? With what are manufacturers abroad to be tempted? Certainly not with the prospect of advertising their merchandise, for already Americans throng among them and are the most extravagant buyers in every European market. Nor will prizes and awards allure men who have already reaped a harvest of metals and honorable mention. Nor will the sole incentive that will bring foreign exhibitors is the keen rivalry of their own immediate competitors; and as, even then, the motive must be very urgent, and the risk and cost and difficulty very slight, it may be confidently asserted that the necessity of transporting the bulk between the place of shipment and the exhibition site, would be to them a fatal objection.
The Senator’s argument in favor of Chicago rests upon the mistaken premise that an inland and prosaic city can be made to appear accessible to distant countries, and attractive, and of central importance. In the characteristics he ascribes to the projected Exhibition, he pictures a county fair on a vast scale, and doubtless in accord with the ideal and interest of the local Illinois. But that is all—and that is not enough. For this author the mode of a single instrument, however shrill its piping, will not suffice. Only the full concert of all nations, and the strength and sweetness and inspiration that all humanity may bring, can commemorate the debt that all humanity owes to Christopher Columbus.
