Greater Britain
TextCHAPTER XXIV.
CALIFORNIA
“IN front of San Francisco are 745 millions of hungry Asiatics, who have spices to exchange for meat and grain.”
The words are Governor Gilpin‘s, made use of by him in discussing the future of overland trade, and worthy of notice as showing why it is that, in making forecasts of the future of California, we have to look more to her facilities for trade than to her natural productions. San Francisco aims at being, not so much the port of California as one of the main stations on the Anglo-Saxon highway round the globe.
Although the chief claim of California to consideration is her position on the Pacific, her fertility and size alone entitle her to notice. This single State is 750 miles in length – would stretch from Chamouni to the southernmost point of Malta. There are two capes in California – one nearly in the latitude of Jerusalem, the other nearly in the latitude of Rome. The State has twice the area of Great Britain; the single valley of the Joaquin and Sacramento, from Tulare Lake to the great snow-peak of Shasta, is as large as the three kingdoms. Every useful mineral, every kind of fertile soil, every variety of helpful climate, are to be found within the State. There are in the Union forty-five such States or Territories, with an average area equal to that of Britain.
Between the Pacific and the snows of the Sierra are three great tracts, each with its soil and character. On the slopes of the Sierra are the forests of giant timber, the sheltered valleys, and the gold fields in which I spent my first week in California. Next comes the great hot plain of Sacramento, where, with irrigation, all the best fruits of the tropics grow luxuriantly, where water for irrigation is plentiful, and the Pacific breeze will raise it. Round the valley are vast tracts for sheep and wheat, and on the Contra Costas are millions of acres of wild oats growing on the best of lands for cattle, while the slopes are covered with young vines. Between the Contra Costa Range and the sea is a winterless strip, possessing for table vegetables and flowers the finest soil and climate in the world. The story goes that Californian boys, when asked if they believe in a future state, reply: “Guess so; California.”
Whether San Francisco will grow to be a second Liverpool or New York is an all-absorbing question to those who live on the Pacific shores, and one not without an interest and a moral for ourselves. New York has waxed rich and huge mainly because she is so placed as to command one of the best harbors on the coast of a country which exports enormously of breadstuffs. Liverpool has thrived as one of the shipping ports for the manufactures of the northern coal counties of England. San Francisco Bay, as the best harbor south of Puget Sound, is, and will remain, the center of the export trade of the Pacific States in wool and cereals. If coal is found in plenty in the Golden State, population will increase, manufactures spring up, and the export of wrought articles take the place of that of raw produce. If coal is found in the Contra Costa Range, San Francisco will continue, in spite of earthquakes, to be the foremost port on the Pacific side; if, as is more probable, the find of coal is confined to the Monte Diablo district, and is of trifling value, still the future of San Francisco, as the meeting point of the railways, and center of the import of manufactured goods, and of the export of the produce of an agricultural and pastoral interior, is as certain as it must inevitably be brilliant. Whether the chief town of the Pacific States will in time develop into one of the commercial capitals of the world is a wider and a harder question. That it will be the converging point of the Pacific railroads, both of Chicago and St. Louis, there can be no doubt. That all the new overland trade from China and Japan will pass through it seems as clear; it is the extent of this trade that is in question. For the moment, land transit cannot compete on equal terms with water carriage; but assuming that, in the long run, this will cease to be the case, it will be the overland route across Russia, and not that through the United States, that will convey the silks and teas of China to Central and Western Europe. The very arguments of which the Californian merchants make use to show that the delicate goods of China need land transport, go to prove that shipping and unshipping in the Pacific, and a repetition in the Atlantic of each process, cannot be good for them. The political importance to America of the Pacific railroads does not admit of overstatement; but the Russian or English Pacific routes must, commercially speaking, win the day. For rare and costly Eastern goods, the English railway through Southern China, Upper India, the Persian coast, and the Euphrates is no longer now a dream. If Russian bureaucracy takes too long to move, trade will be diverted by the Gulf route; coarser goods and food will long continue to come by sea, but in no case can the City of San Francisco become a western outpost of Europe.
The luster of the future of San Francisco is not dimmed by considerations such as these; as the port of entry for the trade of America, with all the East, its wealth must become enormous; and if, as is probable, Japan, New Zealand, and New South Wales become great manufacturing communities, San Francisco must needs in time take rank as a second, if not a greater, London. This, however, is the more distant future. With cheaper labor than the Pacific States and the British colonies possess, with a more settled government than Japan – Pennsylvania and Ohio, from the time that the Pacific railroad is completed, will take, and for years will keep, the China trade. As for the colonies, the voyage from San Francisco to Australia is almost as long and difficult as that from England, and there is every probability that Lancaster and Belgium will continue to supply the colonists with clothes and tools, until they themselves, possessed as they are of coal, become competent to make them. The merchants of San Francisco will be limited in the main to the trade with China and Japan. In this direction the future has no bounds: through California and the Sandwich Islands, through Japan, fast becoming American, and China, the coast of which is already British, our race seems marching westward to universal rule. The Russian empire itself, with all its passive strength, cannot stand against the English horde, ever pushing with burning energy toward the setting sun. Russia and England are said to be nearing each other upon the Indus; but long before they can meet there, they will be face to face upon the Amoor.
For a time, the flood may be diverted south or north: Mexico will doubtless, and British Columbia will probably, carry off a portion of the thousands who are pouring West from the bleak rocks of New England. The Californian expedition of 1853 against Sonora and Lower California will be repeated with success, but the tide will be but momentarily stayed. So entirely are English countries now the motherlands of energy and adventure throughout the world, that no one who has watched what has happened in California, in British Columbia, and on the west coast of New Zealand, can doubt that the discovery of placer gold fields on any coast or in any sea-girt country in the world, must now be followed by the speedy rise there of an English government: were gold, for instance, found in surface diggings in Japan, Japan would be English in five years. We know enough of Chili, of the new Russian country on the Amoor, of Japan, to be aware that such discoveries are more than likely to occur.
In the face of facts like these, men are to be found who ask whether a break-up of the Union is not still probable – whether the Pacific States are not likely to secede from the Atlantic; some even contend for the general principle that “America must go to pieces – she is to big.” It is small powers, not great ones, that have become impossible: the unification of Germany is in this respect but the dawn of a new era. The great countries of to-day are smaller than were the smallest of a hundred years ago. Lewes was farther from London in 1700 than Edinburgh is now. New York and San Francisco will in 1870 be nearer to each other than Canton and Pekin. From the point of view of mere size, there is more likelihood of England entering the Union than of California seceding from it.
The material interests of the Pacific States will always lie in union. The West, sympathizing in the main with the Southerners upon the slavery question, threw herself into the war, and crushed them, because she saw the necessity of keeping her outlets under her own control. The same policy would hold good for the Pacific States in the case of the continental railroad. America, of all countries, alone shares the future of both Atlantic and Pacific, and she knows her interests too well to allow such an advantage to be thrown away. Uncalculating rebellion of the Pacific States upon some sudden heat, is the only danger to be apprehended, and such a rising could be put down with ease, owing to the manner in which these States are commanded from the sea. Throughout the late rebellion, the Federal navy, though officered almost entirely by Southerners, was loyal to the flag, and it would be so again. In these days, loyalty may be said to be peculiarly the sailor‘s passion: perhaps he loves his country because he sees so little of it.
The single danger that looms in the more distant future is the eventual control of Congress by the Irish, while the English retain their hold on the Pacific shores.
…
California is too British to be typically American: it would seem that nowhere in the United States have we found the true America or the real American. Except as abstractions, they do not exist; it is only by looking carefully at each eccentric and irregular America – at Irish New York, at Puritan New England, at the rowdy South, at the rough and swaggering far West, at the cosmopolitan Pacific States – that we come to reject the anomalous features, and to find America in the points they possess in common. It is when the country is left that there rises in the mind an image that soars above all local prejudice – that of the America of the law-abiding, mighty people who are imposing English institutions on the world.
CHAPTER XXV.
MEXICO
IN company with a throng of men of all races, all tongues, and all trades, such as a Californian steamer can alone collect, I came coasting southward under the cliffs of Lower California. Of the thousand passengers who sought refuge from the stifling heat upon the upper and hurricane decks, more than half were diggers returning with a “pile” to their homes in the Atlantic States. While we hung over the bulwarks watching the bonitos and the whales, the diggers threw “bolas” at the boobies that flew out to us from the blazing rocks, and brought them down screaming upon the decks. Threading our way through the reefs off the lovely Island of Margarita, where the “Independence” was lost with three hundred human beings, we lay-to at Cape St. Lucas, and landed his Excellency Don Antonio Pedrin, Mexican Governor of Lower California, and a Juarez man, in the very bay where Cavendish lay in wait for months for the “great Manilla ship” – the Acapulco galleon.
When Girolamo Benzoni visited the Mexican Pacific coast, he confused the turtle with the “crocodile,” describing the former under the latter‘s name; but at Manzanilla, the two may be seen lying almost side by side upon the sands. Separated from the blue waters of the harbor by a narrow strand there is a festering lagoon, the banks of which swarm with the smaller alligators; but a few yards off, upon the other slope, the townsfolk and the turtles they had brought down for sale to our ship‘s purser were lying, when I saw them, in a confused heap under an awning of sailcloth nailed up to the palm-trees. Alligator, turtle, Mexican, it was hard to say which was the superior being. A French corvette was in possession of the port – one of the last of the holding-places through which the remnants of the army of occupation were dribbling back to France.
In the land-locked bay of Acapulco, one of the dozen “hottest places in the world,” we found two French frigates, whose officers boarded us at once. They told us that they landed their marines every morning after breakfast, and re-embarked them before sunset; they could get nothing from the shore but water; the Mexicans, under Alvarez, occupied the town at night, and carried off even the fruit. When I asked about supplies, the answer was sweeping: “Ah, mon Dieu, monsieur, cette ssacrrréeee canaille de Alvarez nous vole tout. Nous n‘avons que de l‘eau fraîche, et Alvarez va nous emporter la fontaine aussi quelque nuit. Ce sont des voleurs, voyez-vous, ces Méchicanos.” When they granted us leave to land, it was with the proviso that we should not blame them if we were shot at by the Mexicans as we went ashore, and by themselves as we came off again. Firing often takes place at night between Alvarez and the French, but with a total loss in many months of only two men killed.
The day of my visit to Acapulco was the anniversary of the issue, one year before, of Marshal Bazaine‘s famous order of the day, directing the instant execution, as red-handed rebels, of Mexican prisoners taken by the French. It is a strange commentary upon the Marshal‘s circular that in a year from its issue the “Latin empire in America” should have had a term set to it by the President of the United States. In Canada, in India, in Egypt, in New Zealand, the English have met the French abroad, and in this Mexican affair history does but repeat itself. There is nothing more singular to the Londoner than the contempt of the Americans for France. All Europe seems small when seen from the United States; but the opinion of Great Britain and the strength of Russia are still looked on with some respect: France alone completely vanishes, and instead of every one asking, as with us, “What does the Emperor say?” no one cares in the least what Napoleon does or thinks. In a Chicago paper I have seen a column of Washington news headed, “Seward orders Lewis Napoleon to leave Mexico right away! Nap. lies badly to get out of the fix!” While the Americans are still, in a high degree, susceptible of affront from England, and would never, if they conceived themselves purposely insulted, stop to weigh the cost of war, toward France they only feel, as a Californian said to me, “Is it worth our while to set to work to whip her?” The effect of Gettysburg and Sadowa will be that, except Great Britain, Italy, and Spain, no nations will care much for the threats or praises of Imperial France.
The true character of the struggle in Mexico has not been pointed out. It was not a mere conflict between the majority of the people and a minority supported by foreign aid, but an uprising of the Indians of the country against the whites of the chief town. The Spaniards of the capital were Maximilian‘s supporters, and upon them the Indians and Mestizos have visited their revenge for the deeds of Cortez and Pizarro. On the west coast there is to be seen no trace of Spanish blood: in dress, in language, in religion the people are Iberian; in features, in idleness, and in ferocity, undoubtedly Red Indian.
In the reports of the Argentine Confederation it is stated that the Caucasian blood comes to the front in the mixed race; a few hundred Spanish families in La Plata are said to have absorbed several hundred thousand Indians, without suffering in their whiteness or other national characteristics. There is something of the frog that swallowed the ox in this; and the theories of the Argentine officials, themselves of the mixed race, cannot outweigh the evidence of our own eyes in the seaport towns of Mexico. There at least it is the Spaniards, not the Indians, who have disappeared; and the only mixture of blood that can be traced is that of Red Indian and negro in the fisher boys about the ports. They are lithe lads, with eyes full of art and fire.
The Spaniards of Mexico have become Red Indians, as the Turks of Europe have become Albanians or Circassians. Where the conquering marries into the conquered race it ends by being absorbed, and the mixed breed gradually becomes pure again in the type of the more numerous race. It would seem that the North American continent will soon be divided between the Saxon and the Aztec republics.
In California I once met with a caricature in which Uncle Sam or Brother Jonathan is lying on his back upon Canada and the United States, with his head in Russian America, and his feet against a tumble-down fence, behind which is Mexico. His knees are bent, and his position cramped. He says, “Guess I shall soon have to stretch my legs some!” There is not in the United States any strong feeling in favor of the annexation of the remainder of the continent, but there is a solemn determination that no foreign country shall in any way gain fresh footing or influence upon American soil, and that monarchy shall not be established in Mexico or Canada. Further than this, there is a belief that, as the south central portions of the States become fully peopled up, population will pour over into the Mexican provinces of Chihuahua and Sonora, and that the annexation of these and some other portions of Mexico to the United States cannot long be prevented. For such acquisitions of territory America would pay as she paid in the case of Texas, which she first conquered, and then bought at a fair price.
In annexing the whole of Mexico, Protestant Americans would feel that they were losing more than they could gain. In California and New Mexico, they have already to deal with a population of Mexican Catholics, and difficulties have arisen in the matter of the church lands. The Catholic vote is powerful not only in California and New York, but in Maryland, in Louisiana, in Kansas, and even in Massachusetts. The sons of the Pilgrim Fathers would scarcely look with pleasure on the admission to the Union of ten millions of Mexican Catholics, and, on the other hand, the day-dreams of Leonard Calvert would not be realized in the triumph of such a Catholicism as theirs any more than in the success of that of the Philadelphia Academy, or New York Tammany Hall.
With the exception of the Irish, the great majority of Catholic emigrants avoid the United States, but the migration of European Catholics to South America is increasing year by year. Just as the Germans, the Norwegians, and the Irish flow toward the States, the French, the Spanish, and the Italians flock into La Plata, Chili, and Brazil. The European population of La Plata has already reached three hundred thousand, and is growing fast. The French “mission” in Mexico was the making of that great country a further field for the Latin immigration; and when the Californians marched to Juarez‘s help, it was to save Mexico to North America.
In all history, nothing can be found more dignified than the action of America upon the Monroe doctrine. Since the principle was first laid down in words, in 1823, the national behavior has been courteous, consistent, firm; and the language used now that America is all-powerful, is the same that her statesmen made use of during the rebellion in the hour of her most instant peril. It will be hard for political philosophers of the future to assert that a democratic republic can have no foreign policy.
The Pacific coast of Mexico is wonderfully full of beauties of a peculiar kind; the sea is always calm, and of a deep dull blue, with turtles lying basking on the surface, and flying-fish skimming lightly over its expanse, while the shores supply a fringe of bright yellow sand at once to the ocean blue and to the rich green of the cactus groves. On every spit or sand-bar there grows the feathery palm. A low range of jungle-covered hills is cut by gullies, through which we get glimpses of lagoons bluer than the sea itself, and behind them the sharp volcanic peaks rise through and into cloud. Once in awhile, Colima, or other giant hill, towering above the rest in blue-black gloom, serves to show that the shores belong to some mightier continent than Calypso‘s isle.