had waited, however, somebody else would have discovered it,—­perhaps some Englishman; and then we might have been spared all the old French and Spanish wars.  Columbus let the Spaniards into the New World; and their civilization has uniformly been a curse to it.  If he had brought Italians, who neither at that time showed, nor since have shown, much inclination to come, we should have had the opera, and made it a paying institution by this time.  Columbus was evidently a person who liked to sail about, and did n’t care much for consequences.

Perhaps it is not an open question whether Columbus did a good thing in first coming over here, one that we ought to celebrate with salutes and dinners.  The Indians never thanked him, for one party.  The Africans had small ground to be gratified for the market he opened for them.  Here are two continents that had no use for him.  He led Spain into a dance of great expectations, which ended in her gorgeous ruin.  He introduced tobacco into Europe, and laid the foundation for more tracts and nervous diseases than the Romans had in a thousand years.  He introduced the potato into Ireland indirectly; and that caused such a rapid increase of population, that the great famine was the result, and an enormous emigration to New York—­hence Tweed and the constituency of the Ring.  Columbus is really responsible for New York.  He is responsible for our whole tremendous experiment of democracy, open to all comers, the best three in five to win.  We cannot yet tell how it is coming out, what with the foreigners and the communists and the women.  On our great stage we are playing a piece of mingled tragedy and comedy, with what denouement we cannot yet say.  If it comes out well, we ought to erect a monument to Christopher as high as the one at Washington expects to be; and we presume it is well to fire a salute occasionally to keep the ancient mariner in mind while we are trying our great experiment.  And this reminds me that he ought to have had a naval salute.

There is something almost heroic in the idea of firing off guns for a man who has been stone-dead for about four centuries.  It must have had a lively and festive sound in Boston, when the meaning of the salute was explained.  No one could hear those great guns without a quicker beating of the heart in gratitude to the great discoverer who had made Boston possible.  We are trying to “realize” to ourselves the importance of the 12th of October as an anniversary of our potential existence.  If any one wants to see how vivid is the gratitude to Columbus, let him start out among our business-houses with a subscription-paper to raise money for powder to be exploded in his honor.  And yet Columbus was a well-meaning man; and if he did not discover a perfect continent, he found the only one that was left.

Columbus made voyaging on the Atlantic popular, and is responsible for much of the delusion concerning it.  Its great practical use in this fast age is to give one an idea of distance and of monotony.