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Remarks of
M r , A . C. Miller
"before
The Harvard Club of Chicago
J a n u a r y 2 2 , 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 m e n , 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 opportunity 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 -

A R T S , 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 i t .

You will notice a great

change since the last groat exposition in which the Government 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 interesting 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 celebrating, 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 u s .

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 h i m .
any government can be is v/hat men make it.
government can do is v/hatjcan do for it.

All that

All that any
Wen in their wisdom

and their courage, or their weakness and their hesitation, are
the stuff of which government is m a d e .

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 d o .

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
p a r t - A \ A l l through the a g e s , 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 m a p .

It is so with the days; they end

sonowhere in the Pacific, and then begin all over again before
they land in A s i a .

It was Alexander who made of this world

an Eastern half -and a Western h a l f .

VJhen he halted his

victorious march in Middle Asia, he fixed the frontier at the
difficult Highlands of A s i a , "the roof of the world", which
from his day to ours has divided one world into two worldhalvos; and through all the centuries East and West have continued East and W e s t , 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 contents 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 ^ l T t i ^ 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 i t .

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 utilization 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."