Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 by Various

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THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

* * * * *

VOL. IX.--MAY, 1862.--NO. LV.

* * * * *

MAN UNDER SEALED ORDERS.

A vessel of war leaves its port, but no one on board knows for what
object, nor whither it is bound. It is a secret Government expedition.
As it sets out, a number of documents, carefully sealed, are put in
charge of the commander, in which all his instructions are contained.
When far away from his sovereign, these are to be the authority which he
must obey; as he sails on in the dark, these are to be the lights on the
deep by which he must steer. They provide for every stage of the way.
They direct what ports to approach and what ports to avoid, what to do
in different seas, what variation to make in certain contingencies, and
what acts to perform at certain opportunities. Each paper of the series
forbids the opening of the next until its own directions have been
fulfilled; so that no one can see beyond the immediate point for which
he is making.

The wide ocean is before that ship, and a wider mystery. But in the
passage of time, as the strange cruise proceeds, its course begins to
tell upon the chart. The zigzag line, like obscure chirography, has an
intelligible look, and seems to spell out intimations. As order after
order is opened, those sibyl leaves of the cabin commence to prophesy,
glimpses multiply, surmises come quick, and shortly the whole ship's
company more than suspect, from the accumulating _data_ behind them,
what must be their destination, and the mission they have been sent to
accomplish.

People are beginning to imagine that the career of the human race is
something like this. There is a fast-growing conviction that man has
been sent out, from the first, to fulfil some inexplicable purpose, and
that he holds a Divine commission to perform a wonderful work on the
earth. It would seem as if his marvellous brain were the bundle of
mystic scrolls on which it is written, and within which its terms are
hid,--and as if his imperishable soul were the great seal, bearing the
Divine image and superscription, which attests its Almighty original.

This commission is yet obscure. It has so far only gradually opened to
him, for he is sailing under sealed orders. He is still led on from
point to point. But the farther he goes, and the more his past gathers
behind him, the better is he able to imagine what must be before him.
His chart is every day getting more full of amazing indications. He is
beginning to feel about him the increasing press of some Providential
design that has been permeating and moulding age after age, and to
discover that be has been all along unconsciously prosecuting a secret
mission. And so it comes at last that everything new takes that look;
every evolution of mind, every addition to knowledge, every discovery of
truth, every novel achievement appearing like the breaking of seals and
opening of rolls, in the performance of an inexhaustible and mysterious
trust that has been committed to his hands.

It is the purpose of this paper to collect together some of these facts
and incidents of progress, in order to show that this is not a mere
dream, but a stupendous reality. History shall be the inspiration of our
prophecy.

There is a past to be recounted, a present to be described, and a future
to be foretold. An immense review for a magazine article, and it will
require some ingenuity to be brief and graphic at the same time. In the
attempt to get as much as possible into the smallest space, many things
will have to be omitted, and some most profound particulars merely
glanced at; but enough will be furnished, perhaps, to make the point we
have in view.

We may compare human progress to a tall tree which has reared itself,
slowly and imperceptibly, through century after century, hardly more
than a bare trunk, with here and there only the slight outshoot of some
temporary exploit of genius, but which in this age gives the signs of
that immense foliage and fruitage which shall in time embower the whole
earth. We see but its spring-time of leaf,--for it is only within fifty
years that this rich outburst of wonders began. We live in an era when
progress is so new as to be a matter of amazement. A hundred years
hence, perhaps it will have become so much a matter of course to
develop, to expand, and to discover, that it will excite no comment. But
it is yet novel, and we are yet fresh. Therefore we may gaze back at
what has been, and gaze forward at what is promised to be, with more
likelihood of being impressed than if we were a few centuries older.

If we look down at the roots out of which this tree has risen, and then
up at its spreading branches,--omitting its intermediate trunk of ages,
through which its processes have been secretly working,--perhaps we may
realize in a briefer space the wonder of it all.

In the beginning of history, according to received authority, there
was but a little tract of the earth occupied, and that by one family,
speaking but one tongue, and worshipping but one God,--all the rest of
the world being an uninhabited wild. At _this_ stage of history the
whole globe is explored, covered with races of every color, a host of
nations and languages, with every diversity of custom, development of
character, and form of religion. The physical bound from that to this is
equalled only by the leap which the world of mind has made.

Once upon a time a man hollowed a tree, and, launching it upon the
water, found that it would bear him up. After this a few little floats,
creeping cautiously near the land, were all on which men were wont to
venture. _Now_ there are sails fluttering on every sea, prodigious
steamers throbbing like leviathans against wind and wave; harbors are
built, and rocks and shoals removed; lighthouses gleam nightly from ten
thousand stations on the shore; the great deep itself is sounded by
plummet and diving-bell; the submarine world is disclosed; and man
is gathering into his hands the laws of the very winds that toss its
surface.

Once the earth had a single rude, mud-built hamlet, in which human
dwellings were first clustered together. _Now_ it is studded with
splendid cities, strewn thick with towns and villages, diversified by
infinite varieties of architecture: sumptuous buildings, unlike in every
clime, each as if sprung from its own soil and made out of its air.

Once there were only the elementary discoveries of the lever, the wedge,
the bended bow, the wheel; Tubal worked in iron and copper, and Naamah
twisted threads. Since then what a jump the mechanical arts have made!
These primitive elements are now so intricately combined that we can
hardly recognize them; new forces have been added, new principles
evolved; ponderous engines, like moving mountains of iron, shake the
very earth; many-windowed factories, filled with complex machinery
driven by water or its vapor, clatter night and day, weaving the plain
garments of the poor man and the rich robes of the prince, the curtains
of the cottage and the upholstery of the palace.

Once there were but the spear and bow and shield, and hand-to-hand
conflicts of brute strength. See now the whole enginery of war, the art
of fortification, the terrific perfection of artillery, the mathematical
transfer of all from the body to the mind, till the battlefield is but
a chess-board, and the battle is really waged in the brains of the
generals. How astonishing was that last European field of Solferino,
ten miles in sweep,--with the balloon floating above it for its spy
and scout,--with the thread-like wire trailing in the grass, and
the lightning coursing back and forth, Napoleon's ubiquitous
aide-de-camp,--with railway-trains, bringing reinforcements into the
midst of the _melee_, and their steam-whistle shrieking amid the
thunders of battle! And what a picture of even greater magnificence, in
some respects, is before us to-day! A field not of ten, but ten
thousand miles in sweep! McClellan, standing on the eminence of present
scientific achievement, is able to overlook half the breadth of a
continent, and the widely scattered detachments of a host of six hundred
thousand men. The rail connects city with city; the wire hangs between
camp and camp, and reaches from army to army. Steam is hurling his
legions from one point to another; electricity brings him intelligence,
and carries his orders; the aeronaut in the sky is his field-glass
searching the horizon. It is practically but one great battle that is
raging beneath him, on the Potomac, in the mountains of Virginia,
down the valley of the Mississippi, in the interiors of Kentucky and
Tennessee, along the seaboard, and on the Gulf coast. The combatants are
hidden from each other, but under the chieftain's eye the dozen armies
are only the squadrons of a single host, their battles only the separate
conflicts of a single field, the movements of the whole campaign only
the evolutions of a prolonged engagement. The spectacle is a good
illustration of the day. Under the magic of progress, war in its essence
and vitality is really diminishing, even while increasing in _materiel_
and grandeur. Neither time nor space will permit the old and tedious
contests of history to be repeated. Military science has entered upon a
new era, nearer than ever to the period when wars shall cease.

But to go on with a few more contrasts of the past with the present.
Once men wrote only in symbols, like wedges and arrow-heads, on
tiles and bricks, or in hieroglyphic pictures on obelisks and
sepulchres,--afterward in crude, but current characters on stone, metal,
wax, and papyrus. In a much later age appeared the farthest perfection
of the invention: books engrossed on illuminated rolls of vellum, and
wound on cylinders of boxwood, ivory, or gold,--and then put away like
richest treasures of art. What a difference between perfection then and
progress now! To-day the steam printing-press throws out its sheets in
clouds, and fills the world with books. Vast libraries are the vaulted
catacombs of modern times, in which the dead past is laid away, and the
living present takes refuge. The glory of costly scrolls is dimmed by
the illustrated and typographical wonders which make the bookstore a
gorgeous dream. Knowledge, no longer rare, no longer lies in precarious
accumulations within the cells of some poor monk's crumbling brain, but
swells up like the ocean, universal and imperishable, pouring into the
vacant recesses of all minds as the ocean pours into the hollows under
its shore. To-day, newspapers multiplied by millions whiten the whole
country every morning, like the hoar-frost; and books, numerous and
brilliant as the stars, seem by a sort of astral influence to unseal the
latent destinies of many an intellect, as by their illumination they
stimulate thought and activity everywhere.

Once art seemed to have reached perfection in the pictures and
sculptures of Greece and Rome. Yet now those master-pieces are not only
equalled on canvas and in fresco, but reproduced by tens of thousands
from graven sheets of copper, steel, and even blocks of wood,--or, if
modelled in marble or bronze, are remodelled by hundreds, and set up in
countless households as the household gods. It is the glory of to-day
that the sun himself has come down to be the rival and teacher of
artists, to work wonders and perform miracles in art. He is the
celestial limner who shall preserve the authentic faces of every
generation from now until the world is no more. He holds the mirror up
to Nature, paralyzes the fleeting phantom, by chemical subtilty, on the
burnished plate,--and there it is fixed forever. He prepares the optical
illusion of the stereoscope, so that through tiny windows we may look as
into fairy-land and find sections of this magnificent world modelled in
miniature.

Once men imagined the earth to be a flat and limited tract. Now they
realize that it is a ponderous ball floating in infinite ether. Once
they thought the sky was a solid blue concave, studded with blazing
points, an empire of fate, the gold-and-azure floor of the abode of
gods and spirits. Now all that is dissolved away; the wandering planets
become at will broad disks, like sisters of the moon; and countless
millions of stars are now mirrored in the same retina with which the
Magi saw the few thousands of the firmament that were visible from the
plains of Chaldea.

Once men were aware of nothing in the earth beneath its hills and
valleys and teeming soil. Now they walk consciously over the ruins
of old worlds; they can decipher the strange characters and read the
strange history graven on these gigantic tablets. The stony veil is
rent, and they can look inimitable periods back, and see the curious
animals which then moved up and down in the earth.

Once a glass bubble was a wonder for magnifying power. Now the lenses of
the microscope bring an inverted universe to light. Men can look into a
drop and discover an ocean crowded with millions of living creatures,
monsters untypified in the visible world, playing about as in a great
deep.

Once a Roman emperor prized a mysterious jewel because it brought the
gladiators contending in the arena closer to the imperial canopy. Now
observatories, with their revolving domes, crown the heights at every
centre of civilization, and the mighty telescope, poised on exquisite
mechanism, turns infinite space into a Coliseum, brings its invisible
luminaries close to the astronomer's seat, and reveals the harmonies and
splendors of those distant works of God.

Once the supposed elements were fire, and water, and earth, and air;
once the amber was unique in its peculiar property, and the loadstone
in its singular power. Now chemistry holds in solution the elements and
secrets of creation; now electricity would seem to be the veil which
hangs before the soul; now the magnetic needle, true to the loadstar,
trembles on the sea, to make the mariner brave and the haven sure.

We have by no means exhausted the wonders that have accumulated upon
man, in being accumulated by man. Their enumeration would be almost
endless. But we leave all to mention one, with which there is nothing of
old time to compare. It had no beginning then,--not even a germ. It is
the peculiar leap and development of the age in which we live. Many
things have combined to bring it to pass.

A spirit that had been hid, since the world began, in a coffer of metal
and acid,--the genie of the lightning,--shut down, as by the seal of
Solomon in the Arabian tale, was let loose but the other day, and
commenced to do the bidding of man. Every one found that he could
transport his thought to the ends of the earth in the twinkling of an
eye. That spirit, with its electric wings, soon flew from city to city,
and whithersoever the magnetic wire could be traced through the air,
till the nations of all Europe stood as face to face, and the States
of this great Union gazed one upon another. It made a continent like a
household,--a cluster of peoples like members of a family,--each within
hearing of the other's voice.

But one achievement remained to be performed before the whole world
could become one. The ocean had hitherto hopelessly severed the globe
into two hemispheres. Could man make it a single sphere? Could man, like
Moses, smite the waves with his electric rod, and lead the legions of
human thought across dry shod? He could,--and he did. We all remember
it well. A range of submarine mountains was discovered, stretching from
America to Europe. Their top formed a plateau, which, lying within two
miles of the surface, offered an undulating shoal within human reach. A
fleet of steamers, wary of storms, one day cautiously assembled midway
over it. They caught the monster asleep, safely uncoiled the wire, and
laid it from shore to shore. The treacherous, dreadful, omnipotent ocean
was conquered and bound!

How the heart of the two worlds leaped when the news came! Then, more
than at any time before, were most of us startled into a conviction of
how _real_ progress was,--how tremendous, and limitless, apparently, the
power which God had put into man. Not that this, in itself, was greater
than that which had preceded it, but it was the climax of all. The
mechanical feat awoke more enthusiasm than even the scientific
achievement which was its living soul,--not because it was more
wonderful, but because it dispelled our last doubt. We all began to form
a more definite idea of something great to come, that was yet lying
stored away in the brain,--laid there from the beginning. Like the
Magian on the heights of Moab, as he saw the tents of Israel and the
tabernacle of God in the distance, we grew big with an involuntary
vision, and were surprised into prophecies.

It was wonderful to see the Queen of England, on one side of that chasm
of three thousand miles, wave a greeting to the President, and the
President wave back a greeting to the Queen. But it was glorious to see
that chord quiver with the music and the truth of the angelic song:--

"Glory to God in the highest, and on earth
peace,
Good-will toward men!"

Soon, however, came a check to the excitement. For above a score of days
was that mysterious highway kept open from Valentia to Trinity Bay. But
then the spell was lost, the waves flowed back, old ocean rolled on as
before, and the crossing messages perished, like the hosts of Pharaoh in
the sea.

That the miracle is ended is no indication that it cannot be repeated.
For the very reason that the now dead, inarticulate wire, like an
infant, lisped and stammered once, it is certain that another will
soon be born, which will live to trumpet forth like the angel of
civilization, its minister of flaming fire! No one should abate a jot
from the high hope excited then. No imagination should suffer a cloud on
the picture it then painted. Governments and capitalists have not
been idle, and will not be discouraged. Already Europe and Africa are
connected by an electric tunnel under the sea, five hundred miles in
length; already Malta and Alexandria speak to each other through a tube
lying under thirteen hundred miles of Mediterranean waters; already
Britain bound to Holland and Hanover and Denmark by a triple cord of
sympathy which all the tempests of the German Ocean cannot sever. And if
we come nearer home, we shall find a project matured which will carry a
fiery cordon around the entire coast of our country, linking fortress to
fortress, and providing that last, desperate resource of unity, an outer
girdle and jointed chain of force, to bind together and save a nation
whose inner bonds of peace and love are broken.

Such energy and such success are enough to revive the expectation and to
guaranty the coming of the day when we shall behold the electric light
playing round the world unquenched by the seas, illuminating the land,
revealing nation to nation, and mingling language with language, as if
the "cloven tongues like as of fire" had appeared again, and "sat upon
each of them."

It will be a strange period, and yet we shall see it. The word spoken
here under the sun of mid-day, when it speaks at the antipodes, will be
heard under the stars of midnight. Of the world of commerce it may be
written, "There shall be no night there!" and of the ancient clock of
the sun and stars, "There shall be time no longer!"

When the electric wire shall stretch from Pekin, by successive India
stations, to London, and from India, by leaps from island to island, to
Australia, and from New York westward to San Francisco, (as has been
already accomplished,) and southward to Cape Horn, and across the
Atlantic, or over the Strait to St. Petersburg,--when the endless
circle is formed, and the magic net-work binds continent, and city, and
village, and the isles of the sea, in one,--then who will know the world
we live in, for the change that shall come upon it?

Time no more! Space no more! Mankind brought into one vast neighborhood!

Prophesy the greater union of all hearts in this interblending of all
minds. Prophesy the boundless spread of civilization, when all barriers
are swept away. Prophesy the catholicity of that religion in which as
many phases of a common faith shall be endured as there are climes for
the common human constitution and countries in a common world!

In those days men will carry a watch, not with a single face, as now,
telling only the time of their own region, but a dial-plate subdivided
into the disks of a dozen timepieces, announcing at a glance the hour of
as many meridian stations on the globe. It will be the fair type of
the man who wears it. When human skill shall find itself under this
necessity, and mechanism shall reach this perfection, then the soul
of that man will become also many-disked. He will be alive with the
perpetual consciousness of many zeniths and horizons beside his own, of
many nations far different from his own, of many customs, manners, and
ideas, which he could not share, but is able to account for and respect.

We can peer as far as this into the future; for what we predict is only
a reasonable deduction from certain given circumstances that are nearly
around us now. We do not lay all the stress upon the telegraph, as if to
attribute everything to it, but because that invention, and its recent
crowning event, are the last great leap which the mind has made, and
because in itself, and in its carrying out, it summoned all the previous
discoveries and achievements of man to its aid. It is their last-born
child,--the greater for its many parents. There is hardly a science, or
an art, or an invention, which has not contributed to it, or which is
not deriving sustenance or inspiration from it.

This latter fact makes it particularly suggestive. As it was begotten
itself, and is in its turn begetting, so has it been with everything
else in the world of progress. Every scientific or mechanical idea,
every species of discovery, has been as naturally born of one or more
antecedents of its own kind as men are born of men. There is a kith and
kin among all these extraordinary creatures of the brain. They have
their ancestors and descendants; not one is a Melchizedek, without
father, without mother. Every one is a link in a regular order of
generations. Some became extinct with their age, being superseded or no
longer wanted; while others had the power of immense propagation, and
produced an innumerable offspring, which have a family likeness to this
day. The law of cause and effect has no better illustration than the
history of inventions and discoveries. If there were among us an
intellect sufficiently encyclopedic in knowledge and versatile in
genius, it could take every one of these facts and trace its intricate
lineage of principles and mechanisms, step by step, up to the original
Adam of the first invention and the original Eve of the first necessity.

There is a period between us and these first parents of our present
progress that is strangely obscure. It is a sort of antediluvian age, in
which there were evidently stupendous mechanical powers of some kind,
and an extensive acquaintance with some things. The ruins of Egypt alone
would prove this. But a deluge of oblivion has washed over them, and
left these colossal bones to tell what story they can. The only way to
account for such an extinction is, that they were monstrous contrivances
out of all proportion to their age, spasmodic successes in science,
wonders born out of due time,--deriving no sustenance or support from a
wide and various kindred, and therefore, like the giants which were of
old, dying out with their day.

It is different with what has taken place since. Every work has come in
its right time, just when best prepared for, and most required. There is
not one but is sustained on every side, and fits into its place, as each
new piece of colored stone in a mosaic is sustained by the progressive
picture. Every one is conserved by its connections. Whatever has been
done is sure,--and the past being secure, the future is guarantied.
It is impossible that the present knowledge in the world should be
extinguished. Nothing but a stroke of imbecility upon the race, nothing
but the destruction of its libraries, nothing but the paralysis of
the printing-press, and the annihilation of these means of
intercommunication,--nothing but some such arbitrary intervention
could accomplish it. The facts already in human possession, and the
constitution of the mind, together insure what we have as imperishable,
and what we are to obtain as illimitable.

We come now to another suggestive characteristic of the time,--another
of its promises. So far we find Progress gathering fulness and
strength,--making sure of itself. It has also been gathering impetus. It
has been, all along, accumulating momentum, and now it sweeps on with
breathless _rapidity_. The reason is, that, the farther it has gone, the
more it has multiplied its agents. The present generation is not only
carried forward, but is excited in every quarter. The activity and
versatility of the intellect would appear to be inexhaustible. Instead
of getting overstrained, or becoming lethargic, it never was so
powerful, never had so many resources, never was so wide-awake. Men
are busy turning over every stone in their way, in the hope of finding
something new. Nothing would seem too small for human attention, nothing
too great for human undertaking. The government Patent-Office, with
its countless chambers, is not so large a museum of inventions as the
capacious brain of to-day.

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