left for England and Wales. How large is California? You could bury in it England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and have room enough left for Switzerland and Belgium. How large is Colorado? You could bury in it Norway, and have room enough left for Denmark. How large is Iowa? You could bury in it Portugal and Switzerland. How large is Lake Superior? You could sink Scotland in it. How large is New York? You could bury in it Belgium and Switzerland and Greece. How large is the estimated area of arable land in the American Union? Half as large as the United States. How fully occupied? In 1880 the area occupied by the corn crop made a region only about as large as Kansas; that occupied by the wheat crop a space only as large as Alabama; that occupied by the cotton crop, a region less than half the size of Ohio.

How many countries of Europe must be put together to make a region equal in extent to that of the good arable soil of the United States? Austria, Germany, and France? These and more. Spain, Sweden, and Norway added? These and more. England, Scotland, and Ireland in addition? These and more. Portugal, the Netherlands, Greece, Switzerland, Denmark, and Belgium? All these sixteen regions must be thrown together to cover, not our territory as a whole, but that half of it which is good arable soil. These countries, with their good and poor soil, maintain two hundred millions of people. The good land of the United States will certainly sustain as many people as their good and poor land taken together.

With whatever telescope I sweep the horizon, I, for one, stand in awe. I set no dates; I seek to es

tablish approximately no definite numbers. I assert only that America can sustain a larger population than Europe, Asia, and Africa taken together; that, since it can, probably, it ultimately will; that we may expect as large an average population as Europe now possesses; that America is, therefore, yet in its infancy; that for these immense numbers of the human family we stand in trust, and that the age, therefore, has not yet ceased to be a crisis.

EULOGY ON GRANT 1

THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON

(1885)

THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON (1823

), author, was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was educated at Harvard College, and at the Harvard Divinity School.

He fought in the Civil War, was wounded, and obliged to leave the service. He served on the staff of Governor Long of Massachusetts, and was member of the Massachusetts legislature.

He was great, in the first place, through the mere scale of his work. His number of troops, the vast area of his operations, surpassed what the world had before seen. When

he took 15,000 prisoners at Fort Donelson, the capture was three

times as large as when Burgoyne surrendered, in the only American battle thought important enough to

1 From an oration delivered at the commemorative exercises of the city of Cambridge, 1885.

be mentioned by Sir Edward Creasy in his "Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World." When, on July 4, 1863, he took Vicksburg, he received what was then claimed to be the greatest capture of men and armament since the invention of gunpowder, and perhaps since the beginning of recorded history. He captured fifteen generals, 31,600 soldiers and 72 cannon. For victories less than this Julius Cæsar was made dictator for ten years, and his statue was carried in processions with those of the immortal gods. Cæsar at Pharsalia1 took but 24,000 prisoners; Napoleon at Ulm, 23,000,2 Hannibal at Cannæ, but 20,000.3 Yet these in Grant's case were but special victories. How great, then, his power when at the head of the armies of the United States! Neither of these three great commanders ever directed the movements of 1,000,000 men.

But mere numbers are a subordinate matter. He surpassed his predecessors also in the dignity of the object for which he fought. The three great generals of the world are usually enumerated-following Macaulay - as being Cæsar, Cromwell, and Napoleon. Two of these fought in wars of mere conquest, and the contests of the third were marred by a gloomy fanaticism, by cruelty, and by selfishness. General Grant fought to restore a nation, that nation being the hope of the world. And he restored it. His work

1 At Pharsalia, in Thessaly, Cæsar overthrew Pompey and became the master of the Roman world (48 B.c.).

2 At Ulm on the Danube Napoleon captured the Austrian, General Mack, with practically his whole army (1805).

3 At Cannæ (217 B.C.), Hannibal, the great Carthaginian general, utterly defeated the Romans.

was as complete as it was important. Cæsar1 died by violence; Napoleon 2 died defeated; Cromwell's work crumbled to pieces when his hand was cold. Grant's career triumphed in its ending. It is at its height to-day. When we come to the mere executive qualities involved in fighting, we find that Grant habitually combined in action two things rarely brought togetherquickness and perseverance. That could be said of him which Malcolm McLeod said of Charles Edward 4 the Pretender: "He is the bravest man, not to be rash, and the most cautious man, not to be a coward, that I ever saw." He did not have the visible and conspicuous dash of Sherman or Sheridan; he was rather the kind of man whom they needed to have behind them. But in quickness of apprehension and action, where this quality was needed, he was not their inferior, if they were even his equals. He owed to it his first conspicuous victory at Donelson. Looking at the knapsack of the slain enemy, he discovered that they held three days' rations, and knew, therefore, that they were trying to get away. Under this stimulus he renewed the attack, and the day was won.

5

6

1 Cæsar was assassinated in the senate house of Rome by a band of conspirators led by Brutus (44 B.C.).

2 Napoleon died a prisoner of the British on the island of St. Helena (1821).

3 Cromwell died in 1658, and the monarchy was restored in 1660. 4 The "Young Pretender," grandson of James II of England. The insurrection of 1745-1746 was intended to place him upon the throne of Great Britain.

5 William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891), one of the greatest generals on the side of the North in our Civil War.

Philip Henry Sheridan (1831-1888), the greatest cavalry commander in the Northern armies during the Civil War.

Moreover, it is to be noticed that he was, in all his acts, as a commander, essentially original — a man of initiative, not of routine. He was singularly free from the habit of depending on others.

And to crown all these qualities was added one more, that of personal modesty. When, at Hamburg, Germany, he was toasted as "The man who had saved the nation," he replied, "What saved the Union was the coming forward of the young men of the country." He put down the pride of the German officers, the most self-sufficient military aristocracy of the world, by quietly disclaiming the assumption of being a soldier at all. He said to Bismarck: 1"I am more a farmer than a soldier. I take little or no interest in military affairs, and, though I entered the army thirty-five years ago, and have been in two wars the Mexican as a young lieutenant, and later (mark the exquisite moderation of that 'and later') I never went into the army without regret, and never retired without pleasure."

He told Bismarck, as we have seen, that he never entered a war without regret or retired from it without pleasure. But he was destined to enter on just one more campaign - against pain and disease, combined with sudden poverty. It was a formidable coalition. It is sometimes said that it is easier to die well than to live well; but it is harder than either to grow old, knowing that one's great period of action is past, and weighed down with the double weight of hopeless financial failure and irremediable bodily pain. Either bankruptcy or physical torture has by itself crushed

1 "The Iron Chancellor," the real founder of the modern German Empire.