Walt Whitman expresses the great characteristic of American history:  “Here is what moves in magnificent masses careless of particulars.”

It is this mass movement, slow at first, but swift and irresistible when the mass has come to consciousness of its own tendency, which has always confounded astute persons who have been interested only in particulars.  It is a movement like that of the Mississippi at flood-time.  The great river flows within its banks as long as it can.  But the time comes when the barriers are too frail to hold back the mighty waters.  Then the river makes, very quickly, a channel for itself.  You cannot understand what has happened till you take into account the magnitude of the river itself.

Now, the successful man of affairs, who has been intent on the incidents of the passing day, is often strangely oblivious of the mass movements.  You, for example, are disturbed by the unrest which is manifest, and you look for some one whom you can blame for the disturbance.  But perhaps no one is to blame.

I think that what is happening may be traced to a sufficient cause.  We are approaching the end of one great era in American history and we are preparing, as best we may, for a new era.  The consciousness of the magnitude of the change has come to us rather suddenly.  One big job which has absorbed the energies and stimulated the ambition of Americans for three hundred years is practically finished.  Some work still remains to be done on it, but it no longer demands the highest ability.  The end is in sight.

This work has been the settlement of a vast territory, lying between the Atlantic and Pacific, with a population of white men.  It was a task so big in itself that it fired the imagination and developed that peculiar type of character which we call American.  In its outlines the task was so broad and simple that it could be comprehended by the most ordinary intelligence.  It was so inevitable that it impressed upon all those engaged in it the belief in Manifest Destiny.

What has been treated by incompetent critics as mere boastfulness has in reality been practical sagacity and foresight.  Sam Slick was only expressing a truth when he said, “The Yankees see further than most folks.”  This was not because of any innate cleverness but because of their advantage in position.  Americans have had a more unobstructed view of the future than had the people of the overcrowded Old World.  The settlers on the shores of the Atlantic had behind them a region which belonged to them and their children.  They soon became aware of the riches of this hinterland and of its meaning for the future.  This vast region must be settled.  Roads must be built over the mountains, the forests must be felled, mines must be opened up, farms must be brought under the plow, great cities must be built by the rivers and lakes, there must be schools and churches and markets established where now the tribes of Indians roam.  The surplus millions of Europe must be transported to this wilderness.