OCR Text |
Show SETTLEMENT AND TRAVEL. There are some queer habits among men in this world. One is that the tide of emigration and settlement has always been to the west, the rage of wealthy people to travel, has always been to fl the east The Meads and Persians swept down upon Asia Minor and Egypt and tried to envelope Greece. The Tartars pushed out into Russia; the Greeks invaded Italy but they did not com-prehend com-prehend the power growing there which .H was to take in the known world. When the men around where Constantinople now stands wanted to make a journey, they never rested until they had visited Babylon. The young bloods of Rome thought there was no iH place to go but to Greece or across to Egypt. When Great Britain and France became nations and the doctors did not know what else to" tell a jH patient they advised a winter in Italy. The dream of the boys and girls in western Massachusetts jH and Vermont is that sometime they will see Bos-ton Bos-ton and Bunker Hill monument. In the old days in the country districts of Ohio and Indiana the end of the world was Cincinnati. To the boy in ,H the Shennandoah valley Richmond was the Athens and Washington City the Mecca of the new world. When Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore 'H and Charleston became cities, thousands and hundreds of thousands of their people took a forty-days' sail in the old fashioned sail-ships to gaze on the wonders of London and Paris, while jjH not one in ten of them had ever made the voyage by the Erie canal to Niagara Falls. When they returned they wore the same expression of awe and superiority that did the Missouri boy whose jH home was in western Missouri and who went down and spent three days in St. Louis, and who on his return explained to his wondering family '11 and neighbors that "if the world is as big the fl other way it's a h 1 of a world." H It has always been the same way. The Pike county man pushed his ox team and wagon out west, further and further west until he one morning ran up against the Pacific ocean, and after a careful consideration of the conditions jH decided that it was too big to either ford or go around, and so settled. But when his oldest son got big enough to travel he never rested until he jjE went back to St. Joe, and if possible, to St. Louis. jH If one will keep watch, here in this city, he will IH note that when old Califurnians want to make a journey they like to go to San Francisco, but when a resident who has never been further west "H takes a journey, he is prone to board a Union HE Pacific or Rio Grande train. On business the "J eastern man will push west to and across the I Pacific or up to Alaska, or off to Australia or down the coast to Chili, but when it comes to making a visit he makes one so that when he returns re-turns he can say: "When I was abroad." This immemorial habit is the biggest obstacle in the way of "Seeing America first." If the continent con-tinent could suddenly be turned around, there would be no trouble. A hundred thousand people would be camping out three months from now between San Francisco and Seattle. |