The Evacuation of England: The Twist in the Gulf Stream

Alexander Leacraft was regarding with as much interest as his constitutional lassitude permitted, the progress of a distinctly audible altercation on Pennsylvania avenue, Washington, D. C. The disputants had not felt it necessary, under the relaxing influences of a premature spring, to interpose any screen of secrecy, such as a less exposed position, or subdued voices, between themselves and the news-mongering (and hungering, let it be added) proletariat of our nation’s capital.

A small crowd, composed of the singular human compound always pervasive and never to be avoided in Washington, which, in that centre of political sensations, is made up of street loafers, accidental tourists, perambulating babies, “niggers,” and presumptive statesmen, enclosed this “argument”; and from his elevated station, within the front parlor of the McKinley, Mr. Leacraft was afforded a very excellent view of and an equally distinct hearing of the disagreement and its principals.

The two disputants were themselves sufficiently contrasted in appearance to have allured the casual passer-by to observe their contrasted methods in debate. One—the taller—was a thin, angular man with unnaturally long arms, a peculiar swaying habit of body, an elongated visage, terminating in a short, stubby growth of whiskers, and a sharp, crackling kind of voice, with unmistakable nasal faults. He seemed to be a southern man modified by a few imitations of the northern type.

He was addressing a bulky, rather disdainful man in a checquered suit of clothes, who had advanced the season’s fashion by assuming a straw hat, and whose rosy face, broad and typical features, and yet not plethoric expansion of body, strong and stalwart frame betokened much animal force, and reserved power of action. He might have been a northern man. As Alexander Leacraft looked at them, it was the southern man who was speaking, and his uplifted arm, at regular intervals, rose and fell, as the palms of both hands met in a cadence of corroborative whacks. It may interest the reader to know that the particular time of this particular incident was April, 1909.

“Let me tell you this, Mr. Tompkins,” drawled the southerner with loquacious ease, the crackle andsharpness of his intonation appearing as his excitement increased, “the necessities of our states demand the Canal at whatever cost. It will be the avenue for an export trade to the east, which will convert our stored powers of production into gold, and it will react upon the whole country north and south in a way that will make all previous prosperity look like nothing. Our cotton mills have grown, our mineral resources have been developed; Georgia and Alabama are to-day competing with your shaft furnaces and steel mills for the trade of the railroads, and builders; and for that matter we are building ourselves. We can support a population ten times all we have to-day; our resources have been just broached, but exhaustion is a thousand years away. Our rival has been Cuba. She has robbed us of trade; she has put our sugar plantations out of business; even her iron, which I will admit is superior in quality, has scaled our profits on raw ingots, but she can’t hold us down on cotton. Open up this canal, and we will gather the riches of the Orient; our ships will fill it with unbroken processions, and in the train of that commerce in cotton, every section of the Union will furnish its contribution to swell the argosies of trade. I tell you sir” and the excited speaker, conscious of an admiring sympathy in the crowd around him, raised his voice into a musical shout, in which the crackle was quite lost, “the commerce, the mercantile integrity of these United States will be restored, and American bottoms for American goods will be no longer a vain aspiration; it will be a realized dream, an actual fact.”