The Evacuation of England: The Twist in the Gulf Stream

IN WASHINGTON, APRIL, 1909.

Alexander Leacraft was regarding with as much interest as his constitutional lassitude permitted, the progress of a distinctly audible altercation on Pennsylvania avenue, Washington, D. C. The disputants had not felt it necessary, under the relaxing influences of a premature spring, to interpose any screen of secrecy, such as a less exposed position, or subdued voices, between themselves and the news-mongering (and hungering, let it be added) proletariat of our nation’s capital.

A small crowd, composed of the singular human compound always pervasive and never to be avoided in Washington, which, in that centre of political sensations, is made up of street loafers, accidental tourists, perambulating babies, “niggers,” and presumptive statesmen, enclosed this “argument”; and from his elevated station, within the front parlor of the McKinley, Mr. Leacraft was afforded a very excellent view of and an equally distinct hearing of the disagreement and its principals.

The two disputants were themselves sufficiently contrasted in appearance to have allured the casual passer-by to observe their contrasted methods in debate. One--the taller--was a thin, angular man with unnaturally long arms, a peculiar swaying habit of body, an elongated visage, terminating in a short, stubby growth of whiskers, and a sharp, crackling kind of voice, with unmistakable nasal faults. He seemed to be a southern man modified by a few imitations of the northern type.

He was addressing a bulky, rather disdainful man in a checquered suit of clothes, who had advanced the season’s fashion by assuming a straw hat, and whose rosy face, broad and typical features, and yet not plethoric expansion of body, strong and stalwart frame betokened much animal force, and reserved power of action. He might have been a northern man. As Alexander Leacraft looked at them, it was the southern man who was speaking, and his uplifted arm, at regular intervals, rose and fell, as the palms of both hands met in a cadence of corroborative whacks. It may interest the reader to know that the particular time of this particular incident was April, 1909.

“Let me tell you this, Mr. Tompkins,” drawled the southerner with loquacious ease, the crackle and sharpness of his intonation appearing as his excitement increased, “the necessities of our states demand the Canal at whatever cost. It will be the avenue for an export trade to the east, which will convert our stored powers of production into gold, and it will react upon the whole country north and south in a way that will make all previous prosperity look like nothing. Our cotton mills have grown, our mineral resources have been developed; Georgia and Alabama are to-day competing with your shaft furnaces and steel mills for the trade of the railroads, and builders; and for that matter we are building ourselves. We can support a population ten times all we have to-day; our resources have been just broached, but exhaustion is a thousand years away. Our rival has been Cuba. She has robbed us of trade; she has put our sugar plantations out of business; even her iron, which I will admit is superior in quality, has scaled our profits on raw ingots, but she can’t hold us down on cotton. Open up this canal, and we will gather the riches of the Orient; our ships will fill it with unbroken processions, and in the train of that commerce in cotton, every section of the Union will furnish its contribution to swell the argosies of trade. I tell you sir” and the excited speaker, conscious of an admiring sympathy in the crowd around him, raised his voice into a musical shout, in which the crackle was quite lost, “the commerce, the mercantile integrity of these United States will be restored, and American bottoms for American goods will be no longer a vain aspiration; it will be a realized dream, an actual fact.”

He paused, as if the projectile force of his words had deprived him of breath, and then at the momentary opportunity Mr. Tompkins, in a clear and metallic voice, with a punctuative force of occasional hesitation, undertook his friend’s refutation.

“I’m not contesting the fact, Mr. Snowden,” he said, “that the opening of the Canal means a good deal to your portion of the country. Does it mean as much to the rest of the country, and does it mean so much to you for a long time. You mention cotton. Do you know that the cotton cultivation of India and Egypt has increased enormously, and that it is grown with cheaper labor than you can command. You have made the negro acquainted with his value. You have raised his expectations, you have thrust him into a hundred avenues of occupation and every one of his new avocations adds a shilling a day to the worth per man of the remainder, who stick to field work and cultivate your cotton fields. The cotton of Egypt and the cotton of India, I mean its manufactured forms, will go through that canal to Asia and Japan and Polynesia just as surely as yours will, and it’ll go cheaper. It is poorer cotton, I know, but that will not effect the result.

“That isn’t all. Brazil and the Argentine Republic are growing cotton, and they are doing well at it. Europe will take the raw stuff from them and keep up her present predominance in that market while she turns their cotton bolls into satinettes and ginghams for the almond-eyes of Asia. The canal, breaking down a barrier of separation between the two oceans, turns loose into the Pacific the whole frenzied, greedy and capable cohorts of European manufacture. It will make a common highway for Europe, and our unbuilt clippers and tramp steamers will stay unbuilt, or unused, to rot on their ways in the shipyards. The west coast will be sidetracked, and our trunk railroads will cut down their schedules and their dividends at the same time. Roosevelt put this canal through, and your southern votes helped to elect him against his protest, but brought to it by an overwhelming public sentiment that applauded his power to chain or sterilize trusts; and he promised last March to your southern rooters, at his inauguration, to see that before his present new term was over, before 1913, the canal would be opened, and perhaps he’ll make good.

“You southerners elected Roosevelt, and you have killed the Democratic party. The new powers of growth of that party were most likely to develop among you, but you shoved aside the proffered offer of political supremacy, because you too had surrendered to the idols of Mammon, and were willing to sell your birth-right for a mess of pottage. Well! You’ve got the canal and you’ve got Roosevelt, and let me tell you Mr. Snowden,” and the restrained, almost nonchalant demeanor of Mr. Tompkins became suddenly charged with electric earnestness, “you’ll get Hell, too.”

This admonitory expletive, uttered with a force that seemed to impart to it a physical objectivity, caused the increasing circle of auditors to retreat sensibly, and, without more consideration, giving a glance of mute scorn at the flushed face of the southerner, the speaker pressed his way through the little crowd, which, after a moment’s suspension of judgment, seemed reluctant to let him escape, and disappeared.

His opponent was distinctly chagrined. The wrinkled lines about his peculiarly pleasant eyes, indicated his strained attention, and were not altogether unrelated to a sudden muscular movement in his clenched hands. His hopes, however, for some sort of forensic gratification might have been sensibly raised as he discovered himself the sole occupant of the small vacant spot on the side walk, walled in by a human investiture, the first line of which was made up of two pickaninnies, three newsboys, one rueful cur and some impromptu mothers who had taken the family babies out for air and recreation, but, overcome by the indigenous love of debate, had forgotten their mission, and held their charges in various attitudes of somnolence or furtive rebellion against the hedge of men behind them.

It was evidently expected that the southern gentleman would relieve his feelings, and it was also evident from a few ejaculations hap-hazardly emitted from the concourse, that the majority of those present was in his favor.

Mr. Snowden looked around him reflectively, and a sense of personal dignity forced its way against the almost over-powering impulse to appeal to popular approval, and convinced him that the place and the audience were inopportune for any further discussion. He could not, however, escape the demonstrated force of popular expectancy, and, with a consenting smile, a shrug of his shoulders, and with his hat raised above his head, swinging gently, he called out “Three cheers for Teddy and the Canal.”

In an instant the group seized the invitation, and under the cover, if it may be so violently symbolized, of the cloud of vocality, his enthusiasm evoked, Mr. Snowden, like the fortuitous and directive deities of the epics, vanished.

There remained an unsatisfied group to which more accessions were quickly made, the whole movement evidently animated by some emotion then predominant in the national capital. This group broke up into little knots of talkers, and as the day was closing, no urgency of business engagements and no immediate insistency of domestic duties interfered with the easily elicited Washingtonian tendency to settle, on the public curb, the vexed questions of state, if not to enlighten Providence on the more abstruse functions of His authority.

Alexander Leacraft willingly surrendered himself to the study of this representative public Althing, and felt his exasperating torpor so much overcome by a new curiosity as to make him not averse to stepping out into the hall of the hotel, descending the steps into the street, and engaging himself in the capacity of a rotational listener at the various groups, sometimes not exceeding two men, who had become vocally animated, and felt themselves called upon to supply the deficiency of objurgation, so disagreeably emphasized by the sudden departure of the northern and southern disputants.

The illuminative results of his ambulatory inspection, and his own expostulations or inquiry, may be thus succinctly summarized.

Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, elected in his own behalf in 1905, as president of the United States, after having served out the unexpired term of William McKinley, who was assassinated in November, 1901, and with whom he had been elected as vice president, had been again re-elected in the fall of 1908, against his emphatic rejection, at first, of a joint nomination of the Republican and Democratic parties. The campaign, if campaign it could be called, had been one of the most extraordinary ever recorded, and in its features of popular clamor, the grotesque conflict of the personal repugnance of an unwilling candidate nominated against his will, and in defiance of his own repeated inhibitions to nominate him at all, because of his solemn promise that he would defer to the unwritten law of the country, and not serve a third term, was altogether unprecedented, and to some observers ominous. He was reminded that his first term, although practically four years, was still only an accident, that there was no subversion of the unwritten law, in his serving again, as his actual election as president had occurred but once, that his popularity among the people was of such an intense, almost self-devouring ardor, that it was an act of suicidal negation, of unpatriotic desertion to shun or reject the people’s obvious need, that a war, yet unfinished, had been begun by him against corporate interests, that its logical continuance devolved upon him, that the unique occasion of a unanimous nomination to the presidency carried with it a sublime primacy of interest, that cancelled all previous conditions, promises or wishes on his part, and laid an imperious command upon its subject that deprived him of volition, and absolutely dissolved into nothingness any apparent contradiction of his words and acts. Finally, it was insisted that the Panama Canal was nearing completion, that its remarkable advance was due to Mr. Roosevelt that this fact had been prepotent in shaping the councils of southern Democrats in proposing the, otherwise unwarranted, endorsement of a Republican nomination, that a strong minority sentiment had crystallized around an angry group of capitalists who were only too anxious to get rid of Roosevelt altogether, and that in the case of his refusal, these men would so manipulate the newspapers, and inflame public apprehension, against some possible outbreak of social radicalism, financial heresy, and anarchistic violence, that a reaction begun would become unmanageable, and some tool of the reactionaries, and the railroads, would be swept into office, and with him a servile Congress, and Roosevelt’s work, so aggressively and successfully prosecuted, would be all sacrificed. Nor was this all. The return to a divided nomination, with an unmistakable intention on the part of the conservatists to repeal all disadvantageous legislation to the monopolies, corporations and trusts, would at once precipitate a conflict of classes.