responsible for our
whole tremendous experiment of democracy, open to all comers, the best
three in five to win. We cannot yet tell how it is coming out, what with
the foreigners and the communists and the women. On our great stage we
are playing a piece of mingled tragedy and comedy, with what denouement
we cannot yet say. If it comes out well, we ought to erect a monument
to Christopher as high as the one at Washington expects to be; and we
presume it is well to fire a salute occasionally to keep the ancient
mariner in mind while we are trying our great experiment. And this
reminds me that he ought to have had a naval salute.

There is something almost heroic in the idea of firing off guns for a
man who has been stone-dead for about four centuries. It must have had
a lively and festive sound in Boston, when the meaning of the salute was
explained. No one could hear those great guns without a quicker beating
of the heart in gratitude to the great discoverer who had made Boston
possible. We are trying to "realize" to ourselves the importance of the
12th of October as an anniversary of our potential existence. If any one
wants to see how vivid is the gratitude to Columbus, let him start out
among our business-houses with a subscription-paper to raise money for
powder to be exploded in his honor. And yet Columbus was a well-meaning
man; and if he did not discover a perfect continent, he found the only
one that was left.

Columbus made voyaging on the Atlantic popular, and is responsible for
much of the delusion concerning it. Its great practical use in this fast
age is to give one an idea of distance and of monotony.

I have listened in my time with more or less pleasure to very rollicking
songs about the sea, the flashing brine, the spray and the tempest's
roar, the wet sheet and the flowing sea, a life on the ocean wave, and
all the rest of it. To paraphrase a land proverb, let me write the songs
of the sea, and I care not who goes to sea and sings 'em. A square yard
of solid ground is worth miles of the pitching, turbulent stuff. Its
inability to stand still for one second is the plague of it. To lie on
deck when the sun shines, and swing up and down, while the waves run
hither and thither and toss their white caps, is all well enough to lie
in your narrow berth and roll from side to side all night long; to walk
uphill to your state-room door, and, when you get there, find you have
got to the bottom of the hill, and