Revolution and Other Essays

At the bungalow I lie in wait for chance visitors. Craftily I broach the subject, watching their faces closely the while to detect fi rst signs of disapprobation, whereupon I empty long­stored vials of wrath upon their heads. I wrangle for hours with whomsoever does not say I am right. I am become like Guy de Maupassant’s old man who picked up a piece of string. I am incessantly explaining, and nobody will understand. I have be­come more brusque in my treatment of the predatory city folk. No longer do I take delight in their disburdenment, for it has become an onerous duty, a wearisome and distasteful task. My friends look askance and murmur pityingly on the side when we meet in the city. They rarely come to see me now. They are afraid. I am an embittered and disappointed man, and all the light seems to have gone out of my life and into my blazing fi eld. So one pays for things.

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The advantage of the animal over the vegetable kingdom is obvious. The cabbage, should its environment tend to be­come worse, must live it out, or die; the rabbit may move on in quest of a better. But, after all, the swift-footed creatures are circumscribed in their wanderings. The fi rst large river almost inevitably bars their way, and certainly the fi rst salt sea becomes an impassable obstacle. Better locomotion may be classed as one of the prime aims of the old natural selec­tion; for in that primordial day the race was to the swift as surely as the battle to the strong. But man, already preemi­nent in the common domain because of other faculties, was not content with the one form of locomotion afforded by

his lower limbs. He swam in the sea, and, still better, becom­ing aware of the buoyant virtues of wood, learned to navi­gate its surface. Likewise, from among the land animals he chose the more likely to bear him and his burdens. The next step was the domestication of these useful aids. Here, in its organic signifi cance, natural selection ceased to concern it­self with locomotion. Man had displayed his impatience at her tedious methods and his own superiority in the hasten­ing of affairs. Thenceforth he must depend upon himself, and faster-swimming or faster-running men ceased to be bred. The one, half-amphibian, breasting the water with muscular arms, could not hope to overtake or escape an enemy who propelled a fi re-hollowed tree trunk by means of a wooden paddle; nor could the other, trusting to his own nimbleness, compete with a foe who careered wildly across the plain on the back of a half-broken stallion.

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Of this struggle one thing may be safely predicated; a com­mercial power must be a sea power. Upon the control of the sea depends the control of trade. Carthage threatened Rome till she lost her navy; and then for thirteen days the smoke of her burning rose to the skies, and the ground was ploughed and sown with salt on the site of her most splendid edifi ces. The cit­ies of Italy were the world’s merchants till new trade routes were discovered and the dominion of the sea passed on to the west and fell into other hands. Spain and Portugal, inau­gurating an era of maritime discovery, divided the new world between them, but gave way before a breed of sea-rovers, who, after many generations of attachment to the soil, had returned to their ancient element. With the destruction of her Armada Spain’s colossal dream of colonial empire passed away. Against the new power Holland strove in vain, and when France acknowledged the superiority of the Briton upon the sea, she at the same time relinquished her designs upon

the world. Hampered by her feeble navy, her contest for su­premacy upon the land was her last effort, and with the pass­ing of Napoleon she retired within herself to struggle with herself as best she might. For fi fty years England held undis­puted sway upon the sea, controlled markets, and domineered trade, laying, during that period, the foundations of her em­pire. Since then other naval powers have arisen, their attitudes bearing signifi cantly upon the future; for they have learned that the mastery of the world belongs to the masters of the sea.

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the world. Passionate pilgrims disembarked their outfi ts at Dyea. Over the terrible Chilcoot Pass the trail led to the lakes, thirty miles away. Carriage was yet in its most primitive stage, the road builder and bridge builder unheard of. With heavy packs upon their backs men plunged waist-deep into hideous quagmires, bridged mountain torrents by felling trees across them, toiled against the precipitous slopes of the ice-worn mountains, and crossed the dizzy faces of innumerable gla­ciers. When, after incalculable toil they reached the lakes, they went into the woods, sawed pine trees into lumber by hand, and built it into boats. In these, overloaded, unseaworthy, they battled down the long chain of lakes. Within the memory of the writer there lingers the picture of a sheltered nook on the shores of Lake Le Barge, in which half a thousand gold seekers lay storm-bound. Day after day they struggled against the seas in the teeth of a northerly gale, and night after night returned to their camps, repulsed but not disheartened. At the rapids they ran their boats through, hit or miss, and after infi nite toil and hardship, on the breast of a jarring ice fl ood, arrived at the Klondike. From the beach at Dyea to the eddy below the Barracks at Dawson, they had paid for their temerity the tax of human life demanded by the elements. A year later, so great had the country shrunk, the tourist, on disembarking from the ocean steamship, took his seat in a modern railway coach. A few hours later, at Lake Bennet, he stepped aboard a commodious river steamer. At the rapids he rode around on a tramway to take passage on another steamer below. And in a few hours more he was in Dawson, without having once soiled the lustre of his civilized foot-gear. Did he wish to com­municate with the outside world, he strolled into the tele­graph offi ce. A few short months before he would have writ-