Speech

Remarks of Mr, A. C. Miller "before The Harvard Club of Chicago January 22, 1915 It i3 good to be hero again* It is good to be hero at any time, but especially when the Sons of Harvard are turning their thoughts westward to California, the Pacific, and the Canal. As a Harvard nan, I congratulate you upon this trip which you are about to take. As a member of the Government Exhibit Board, I can promise you some interesting exhibits. A3 a Californian and a member of the Harvard Club of San Francisco, I thank you for giving us this opportunity •to show you something of our country, and to help you to a glimpse of its new destiny as it will be affected by the Canal and the entrance of the Nation upon the Pacific. The voyage of the "Kroonland", I am sure, will £o down in the annals of Harvard as a re .1 voyage of discovery. It will be tin event of significance in the life of Harvard when five hundred of her men, or more, transfer their intellectual base to the other side of the Continent, even if only for a short time, for a short stay there will work the miracle in your orientation to the conditions which confront o.r country on the Pacific. There is 30 much there that transcends usual experience; so much that is new, and strange, and bis «-bout this new V/estem world on the Pacific; so much that grips the imagination, and stirs the spirit of prophecy: and every one of you will reconstruct his view of the world and the position that this Nation is to occupy with regard to the world problems of the futuro. For you must never forget that it .13 an oceanic event which the Exposition at San Francisco is celebrating, one which by the slashing of the Canal has brought California and the Pacific suddenly and unmistakably into the region of our greater National interests; and it is to this phase of your visit that I would especially draw attention if time and op- portunity permitted. But I am reminded that I have been called here this evening to talk more especially about the Government exhibit at the Scan Francisco Exposition; and your Chairman has warned no that I must talk about them with reserve. VThen you get to the Exposition, you will find Government exhibits occupying some 150,000 square feet of floor space. These exhibits are distributed through the several Exposition palaces - LIBERAL « . a; -3- ARTS, EDUCATION AND SOCIAL ECONOMY, AGRICULTURE, MINING, TRANSPORTATION, and FOOD PRODUCTS* The exhibits of the Government are sot up side by 3ide with private exhibits, and you will have an opportunity to make comparisons of the Government's work and draw your own conclusions as to what kind of a Government it is, what it is trying to do, what it is doing, and how it does it. You will notice a great change since the last groat exposition in which the Govern- ment participated, that at St. Louis in 1904. There has boon a marked extension of the activities of our Government in those ton years; and it i3 these newer activities, which are more characteristic of the recent trend of government in our own country and everywhere else in the civilized world, that have been thought specially deserving of emphasis in the Government exhibit. These activities show the Govern- ment at work as a very positive, constructive fores in the life of the people; show it, too, a very human and helpful institution, moved by generous impulses and showing much intelligence and capacity in its undertakings. I cannot stop to describe, or even enumerate, these new and interest- ing developments; a suggestion or two must suffice. Such activities as THE PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE, with its great work in sanitation and hygiene; THE CHILDREN'S BUREAU, making child welfare its care; THE RECLAMATION SERVICE, bringing wators on the arid lands and making them fit for human homes; THE FINE ARTS COMMISSION, bringing beauty into the field of public works; and overtopping all these in point of present interest and importance, the great achievement which the Exposition is cele- brating, THE PANAMA CANAL» You will find that theso newer activities reveal the Government in a very admirable aspect, and are calculated to inspire much confidence in the ability of our National Government to assume the responsibility which the new temper of the times is more and more disposed to place on government,- to place it there not so much as a matter of philosophical conviction, not 30 much as a matter of political theory, but as a matter of the faith and necessity which are born of experience. Democracy with EFFICIENCY, I believe, will be one of America's great contributions to civilisation in this century. It is of very great moment that we should understand this at this terrible juncture in the world's history, when, whatever other stakes may be involved, the grout issue between the principle^ of liberty and^order is being fought anew in Europe. \Ye are capable of demonstrating, and are demonstrat- ing, that there is nothing incompatible between liberty and order, democracy and efficiency. The Government exhibit at San Francisco will have missed an opportunity, if it does not prove that democracy with efficiency is an attainable ideal for us, by showing that it already is being attained- The Canal is a great achievement in engineering and sanitation, but it is an even greater achievement in American government. It has shown us what we can do through cur Government when we sot about to do it. This great experiment should silence forever the criticism of the skeptic, and that worse enemy of progress, tho cynic, that ours is «n incompetent government. If Colonel Goothais were not here present to-night, I should say that no American of his generation had done so much to expand the American conception of government and given us so much of right to face the future, with confidence in our capacity to meet its demands upon us. He has blazed the way which American government is more and more to take in tho fut and made it easier for those who are to follow him. All that any government can be is v/hat men make it. All that any government can do is v/hatjcan do for it. Wen in their wisdom and their courage, or their weakness and their hesitation, are the stuff of which government is made. There is no magic in government, except the me.gic of service; but that is a mighty magic; and so, whatever men can be and whatever men can do, their government can be and their government can do. This is one of the great and needed and hopeful lesisons which the Exposition is celebrating and teaching. Other expositions have glorified the yesterdays of the Nation and its heroic dead. They wore not of us or with us, except as wo remem- bered and cherished. These expositions invited a backward glance rather than a forward look: but the Exposition at San Francisco glorifies tho To-day and the To-morrow in the life of the Nation, and summons the imagination rather than the memory; and so I might point to Colonel Ooethals and say, "You have here to-night tho Government's greatest exhibit", all the greater because he is just one of us and therefore the warrant of a Nation's faith and the prophecy of its to-morrow. The to-morrow of the Nation!, as affected by the Canal and the joining of the Oceans, is the &re_at question on which the Exposition rivets the attention. Vo live in troublous times, and mighty readjustraents are impending among the nations. What the adjustment will be we can only guess, and what part we shall iky as a Nation in the new adjustments we can only guess; but no one who sails through the Canal or stands on the shores of the Pacific in 1915, can doubt that that long-neglected waste of an ocean is to play its portentous part-A\All through the ages, the Pacific has beon one of the neglected areas of the globe. In the geographies the maps usually begin and end within it; the Pacific is as good as never in the middle of the map. It is so with the days; they end sonowhere in the Pacific, and then begin all over again before they land in Asia. It was Alexander who made of this world an Eastern half -and a Western half. VJhen he halted his victorious march in Middle Asia, he fixed the frontier at the difficult Highlands of Asia, "the roof of the world", which from his day to ours has divided one world into two world- halvos; and through all the centuries East and West have con- tinued East and West, standing back to back at "the roof of -8- th© >,7orid"; and tho centuries have shown that they could never be brought into adjustment by the ways that Europe sought across the wastes of Asia or across the Indian Ocean} and so this world-old problem ha3 become ours, and the Canal is our answer, not that we sought the problem, but such is tho fortune and destiny of nations. For those who settled our country were cooking not the Eastern world, not India, but a new Western world, to be an annex of Europe. From the first landing on the shores of tho Atlantic, their faces remained steadfastly set toward Europe; and oven when they moved into the interior of the Continent, they backed into the country, eyes always to the cast, and America continued an annex of Europe; and so it continued to be when the pioneer pushed his way to the farther side of the Continent and reached the Pacific - it was the land and its con- tents he was seeking, not the Ocean and its meaning; and so California was farthest in the V/eetern world, not farthest out - farthest away from tho Atlantic and Europe, not farthest out toward the Pacific - and the Golden Gate was the back door ^/r^o^lTti^K. But a readjustment is at hand, and the back door may becomo t\e front door. Tho events of 1898, when this Nation for the first time began to comprehend the meaning of tho Pacific for its future, prepared the way; find the event of 1915, which San Francisco is about to celebrate, confirms it. This is the new view of things which California will offer you; and thus at last the two world-halves that have been so long back to back in the middle of Asia, looking away from one another, will be face to face on the shores of the Pacific; and America will more and more turn its face westward where its position on the Pacific inevitably points to its future tasks and destiny, and California will take its God-appointed place as the Outpost of the Occident. "The largest questions affecting the commerce, the peace, and the social conditions of the world for the coming years concern the assimilation of the thought and the utiliza- tion of the industrial force of that Eastern half which the "'est has left thus far mostly out of account." Y/hen the "Kroonland" next summer comes through the Golden Gate, dead ahead of her will be the Contra Costa Shore and the Berkeley Hills. Sixty years ago there wore here a few strag/ling herds and their lazy Mexican herdsmen, and a single house. You will find there now the great University of Cali- fornia, and rising from its midst is a great shaft of granite, some three hundred feet high, the Sather Campanille, just nearing completion. Go to its top and there look out onto the vast, portentous Pacific - ocean of yet unmeasured or unguessed destiny. Linger for a while, and you may then feel what Californians sometimes feel when they recall the words of the ancient prophet, "Your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions."

Adolph C. Miller (1915, January 21). Speech. Speeches, Federal Reserve. https://whenthefedspeaks.com/doc/speech_19150122_miller

@misc{wtfs_speech_19150122_miller,
  author = {Adolph C. Miller},
  title = {Speech},
  year = {1915},
  month = {Jan},
  howpublished = {Speeches, Federal Reserve},
  url = {https://whenthefedspeaks.com/doc/speech_19150122_miller},
  note = {Retrieved via When the Fed Speaks corpus}
}