A ROLLING CONTINENT
LIKE hope, the passion for prophecy springs eternal in the human breast; man is prone to it, as the sparks fly upward. Stripped of its several disguises, a considerable part of the world’s writing and speaking is pure prediction; even the official forecaster of the weather bureau can not resist the universal urge and maintain a discreet and dignified silence befitting his office. Eliminate from politics, for example, all prophecies, expressed or implied—all the jeremiads based on assumption of the opposite party’s success and all the assurances of a golden age to ensue from its defeat—and politics will “look another thing.”
But of all the cloud of witnesses to the kind of mountain which the mouse of our country’s future is to bring forth, none seems clearly to discern the adverse conditions environing the American prophet and foredooming to futility his vision and his dream. None appears to take account of the annulling fact that this continent is turning over like aman in bed; yet it ought to be obvious to the meanest understanding that if this movement continue it will supply conditions suitable to neither the reign of terror consequent upon the success of one’s political opponents nor the golden age dependent on the ascendency of the principles professed by oneself.
It has been shown that the Farallon islands, just off the Pacific coast, are becoming, as Tennyson would put it, “more and more;” the lighthouse keeper out there is in progressive achievement of the rôle of “prominent citizen.” The bar at the mouth of San Francisco harbor is rising faster in fathoms than those farther inland in public esteem. In the steady ascension of the bottom of the bay lurks a possibility which without vanity we may affirm will astonish the astronomers of Mars. In short, the entire Pacific Coast is insurgent.
On the Atlantic seaboard inundations from marine storms occur every year. The waves eat farther and farther into the land; the high-water mark of one decade becomes the low-water mark of the next, and diking as an agricultural method has a growing importance. It is estimated that the greater part of Manhattan island will be submerged within fifty years, and that within an evenshorter period the Jersey mosquito will find no rest for the sole of his foot, and must become a pelican or quit.
But the steady subsidence of the Atlantic littoral foreshadows changes more startling than these—more startling, at least, to some who have not the advantage to be Jersey mosquitoes. Man himself, the man of the Eastern states,Homo smugwumpus, will find himself face to face with a problem of supreme scientific interest and personal importance. Will he travel west and go up with the country, or, staying where he is, develop into a fish and be mighty quick about it? The ordinary process of evolution, whereby a million years are required to change a red worm into a rhinoceros or advance a cave-bat one step in biological preferment and make it a theologian, will not do forH. smugwumpuswhen the wave is at his armpits and his ancestral acres are falling away from his webless feet. Even the fittest of his species must travel with uncommon speed along the line of development in order to survive in the new environment. They must slide nimbly up the scale of being, passing every intermediate stage between smugwumphood and fishness without pausing to enjoy its advantages. Probably, however,most of them will prefer to ascend the new watercourses up the ever-steepening slope of the great plains, settling eventually on the summit of the continent, roundabout San Francisco—where it is to be hoped they will be welcome if they behave themselves. Doubtless they will miss many of the blessings of their lowland existence, but they will find in the superior altitude an immunity from sunstroke and the mad dog, which will be partial compensation for renouncing the fascinating study of the long thermometer.
Probably the turning over of the continent will in time be stayed; to the unscientific mind, at least, its complete subversion is imperfectly thinkable. But for the next few thousand years, while still the memory of the purpose and efficacy of Noah’s deluge is fresh and pleasing in Heaven, the movement will be likely to continue. By the time that it ceases the Atlantic shore will perhaps be a contour line on the eastern declivity of the Rocky Mountains, and the Pacific slope comprise all that region now underlying the “great gulf” between this world and Hawaii. As a practical settlement of the annexation question on a staying basis, this unpolitical movement is worthy of the highest commendation. Withthe construction of the San Francisco and Honolulu Pacific Railroad by Government and at the rate of fifty million dollars a mile in hand paid to the owners of the road, and by them kept for their honesty, the status of the descendants of Kamehameha and Kalakaua will be definitely fixed—they will be payers of All That The Traffic Will Bear.
The upward tendency of the Pacific side of the continent will be attended, no doubt, with certain inconveniences. Already the relentless progress of its ascension has laid “effacing fingers” on theamour propreof several worthy persons who thought themselves heavy enough to hold it down.
1892.