t or lack any outlet for her energies; the unknown sea
at the west at last was ventured upon, and the earth learned that it was
twice as big as it had thought. Columbus did not find, as he had expected,
the civilization of Cathay; he found an empty continent. In that part of
the world, upon that new-found half of the globe, mankind, late in its
history, was thus afforded an opportunity to set up a new civilization;
here it was strangely privileged to make a new human experiment.

Never can that moment of unique opportunity fail to excite the emotion of
all who consider its strangeness and richness; a thousand fanciful
histories of the earth might be contrived without the imagination daring
to conceive such a romance as the hiding away of half the globe until the
fulness of time had come for a new start in civilization. A mere sea
captain's ambition to trace a new trade route gave way to a moral
adventure for humanity. The race was to found a new order here on this
delectable land, which no man approached without receiving, as the old
voyagers relate, you remember, sweet airs out of woods aflame with flowers
and murmurous with the sound of pellucid waters. The hemisphere lay
waiting to be touched with life,--life from the old centres of living,
surely, but cleansed of defilement, and cured of weariness, so as to be
fit for the virgin purity of a new bride. The whole thing springs into the
imagination like a wonderful vision, an exquisite marvel which once only
in all history could be vouchsafed.

One other thing only compares with it; only one other thing touches the
springs of emotion as does the picture of the ships of Columbus drawing
near the bright shores,--and that is the thought of the choke in the
throat of the immigrant of to-day as he gazes from the steerage deck at
the land where he has been taught to believe he in his turn shall find an
earthly paradise, where, a free man, he shall forget the heartaches of the
old life, and enter into the fulfilment of the hope of the world. For has
not every ship that has pointed her prow westward borne hither the hopes
of generation after generation of the oppressed of other lands? How always
have men's hearts beat as they saw the coast of America rise to their
view! How it has always seemed to them that the dweller there would at
last be rid of kings, of privileged classes, and of all those bonds which
had kept men depressed and helpless, and would there realize the full
f