The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 02, No. 12, October, 1858. Various
between them.
"The sea doth wash out all the ills of life," sings Euripides; and it is, indeed, with some penetration of wonder that one observes how deep and productive a relation to man the ocean has sustained. Some share in the greatest enterprises, in the finest results, it seldom fails to have. Not capriciously did the subtile Greek imagination derive the birth of Venus from the foam of the sea; for social love,—that vast reticulation of wedlock which society is—has commonly arisen not far from the ocean-shore. The Persian is the only superior civilization, now occurring to our recollection, which has no intimate relation either with river or sea; and that pushed inevitably toward the Tigris and Euphrates. Now to Europe must be conceded the supremacy in this single respect, that of representing the most intimate coast relation with the sea; North America follows next in order. Africa, washed, but not wedded, by the wave, represents the greatest seclusion,—and has gone into a sable suit in her sorrow. After the ocean, rivers, which are interior highways, claim regard. The United States have on this side the Rocky Mountains more than forty thousand miles of river-flow, that is, eighty thousand miles of river-bank,—counting no stream of less than one hundred miles in length. Europe, in a larger space, has but seventeen thousand miles. The American rivers are nearly all accessible from the ocean, and, owing to the gentle elevation of the continent, flow at easy declivities, and accordingly are largely navigable. The Mississippi descends at an average of only eight inches per mile from source to mouth; the Missouri is said to be navigable to the very base of the Rocky Mountains; and these monarch streams represent the rivers of the continent. Thus here do these highways of God's own making run, as it were, past every man's door, and connect each man with the world he lives in.
Rivers await their due celebration. We easily see that Nile, Ganges, Euphrates, Jordan, Tiber, Thames, are rivers of influence in human history, no less than water-currents on the earth's surface. They have borne barks and barges that the eye never saw. They have brought on their soft bosoms freight to the cities of the brain, as well as to Memphis, Rome, London. Some experience of their spiritual influence must have fallen to the lot of most men. The loved and lovely Merrimac no longer accedes to the writer's eye, but, as of old, glides securely seaward in his thought,—like a strain of masterly music long ago heard, and, when heard, identical in its suggestions with the total significance and vital progress of one's experience, that, intertwining itself as a twin thread with the shuttled fibre of life, it was woven into the same fabric, and became an inseparable part of the consciousness; so, hearken when one will, after the changes and accessions of many peopled years, and amid the thousand-footed trample of the mob of immediate impressions, still secure and predominant it is heard subtly sounding. Deep conversation with any river readily interprets to us that venerable mythus which connects Eden with the four rivers of the world; as if water must flow where man is chiefly blest.
But the point here to be emphasized is, that rivers are the progressive and public element in its geographical expression. They throw the continent open; they are doors and windows, through which the nations look forth upon the world, and leave and enter their own household. They are the hospitality of the continent,—every river-mouth chanting out over the sea a perpetual, "Walk in," to all the world. Or again, they are geographical senses,—eyes, ears, and speech; for of these supreme mediators in the body, voice, vision, and hearing, it is the office, as of rivers, to open communication between the interior and exterior world; they are rivers of access to the outlying universe of men and things, which enters them, and approaches the soul through the freighted suggestions of sight and sound. Rivers, lastly, are the geographical symbol of public spirit, the flowing and connecting element, suggesting common interests and large systems of action.
Thus in these characteristics of Various Productiveness, Unity, and Openness or Publicity, the continent indicates the description of man who may be its fit habitant. It suggests a nation vast in numbers and in power, existing not as an aggregate of fragments, but as an organic unit, the vital spirit of the whole prevailing in each of its parts; and consequently predicts a man suitable for wide and yet intimate societies. Let us not, however, thoughtlessly jump to accept these easy prognostics; first let it be fully understood what an enormous demand they imply. Americans speak complacently of their prospective one hundred millions of inhabitants; but do they bear well in mind that the requisition upon the individual is augmented by every multiplication and extension of the mass? It is not without significance, that great empires have uniformly been, or become, despotisms. Liberty lives only in the life of just principle; and as the weight of an elephant could not be sustained by the skeleton of a gazelle,—as, moreover, the bones must be made stouter as well as longer,—so must a vast body politic be permeated by a sturdier element of justice than is required for a diminutive state. It is, indeed, the chief recommendation of our federative form of government, that this, so far as may be, localizes legislation, and thus, by lessening the number of interests that demand a national consent, lessens equally the strain upon the conscience and judgment of the whole. Near at hand, the mere good feeling of neighbors, the companionable sentiment of cities and clans, proves a valuable succedaneum for that deeper principle which is good for all places and times. But this sentiment, like gravitation, diminishes in the ratio of the square of the distance, and at any considerable remove can no longer be reckoned upon as a counter-balance to the lawlessness of egotism. Athenians could be passably just, or at least not disastrously unjust, to Athenians; Spartans to Spartans; but Sparta must needs oppress the other cities of Laconia, while Athens was at best a fickle ally; and when Grecian liberty could be strong only in Grecian union, the common sentiment was bankrupted by too great a draft upon its resources. How far beyond the range of egotism of neighborhood a free state may go is determined chiefly by limits in the souls of its constituents. At that point where equal justice begins to halt, fatigued by too long a journey, the inevitable boundaries of the state are fixed. Nor is it the mere sentiment of justice alone that suffices; but this must be sustained in its applications by a certain breadth of nature, a certain freedom and flexibility, akin to the dramatic faculty, which enables us to enter into the feelings and wants of others. Nothing, perhaps, in the world can be so unjust as a narrow and frigid conscience beyond its proper range. The bounds of the state may, indeed, not pause where the sustenance of its integral life fails. But then its extension will be purchased with its freedom,—the quality be debased as the quantity increases. Jelly-fish, and creatures of the lowest animation, may sustain magnitude of body, not only with a slight skeleton, but with none at all; and society of a cold-blooded or bloodless kind follows the analogy. But these low grades of social organization, having some show of congruity with the blank levels of Russia, can pretend to none with the continent we inhabit. Yet some species of arbitrament between man and man is sure to establish itself; if it live not, as a part of freedom, in the bosom of each, then does it inevitably build itself into a Fate over their heads; and despotism, war, or similar brutal and violent instrumentalities of adjustment, supply in their way the demand that love and reason failed to meet.
Accordingly, in our American Man must be found, first, social largeness and susceptibility,—whatsoever, in the breadth of a flexile and sympathetic nature, may contribute to the keeping of the Golden Rule. But the broadest good-feeling will not alone suffice. The great pledge of peace, fellowship, and profitable co-working among such a population as we anticipate must be sought in the deeper unity of moral principle. For Right is one, and is every man's interest. Right is better than Charity; for Right meets, or even anticipates, normal wants, while Charity only mends failures. Nothing, therefore, that we could discover in the New Man would be such a security for his future, nothing so fit him for his place, as a tendency to simple and universal principles of action. In the absence of this, he will infallibly be compelled one day to enter Providence's court of chancery, and come forth bankrupt. But let him be, even by promise, a seer of those primary truths in which the interests of all are comprehended and made identical, and the virtue of his vision will become the assurance of his welfare. Doubtless, sad men will say that our own eyes are clouded with some glittering dust of optimism, when we declare that this Man for the Continent is the very one whose advent we celebrate. This might, indeed, seem a fatuitously dulcet song to sing just now, when a din of defection and recreancy is loud through all the land,—now, when we have immediately in view, and on the largest scale, an open patronage of infamous wrong-doing, so brazen-fronted and blush-proof that only the spectacle itself makes its credibility;—the prior possibility of it we should one and all hasten, for the honor of human nature, to deny.