An Anglo-American Alliance: A Serio-Comic Romance and Forecast of the Future

It is 1960, Anno Domini. The Earth, notwithstanding many dire predictions of charlatans and religious fanatics, and in spite of numerous cataclysms, conflagrations and political upheavals, was rotating serenely on its axis.

The Diana Young Ladies’ Seminary, situated upon the picturesque hills of Cornwall on the Hudson, is a few miles north of the West Point Military Academy. The seminary buildings, having formerly been the palatial homestead of a multi-millionaire, about half a century previously had been bequeathed to the State of New York, with ample endowments for its maintenance and development. It had long since become one of the finest institutions of learning of its kind, not only of America, but of the whole civilized world.

The donor of this magnificent seat of knowledge for young ladies was a man of “polarity,” of positive and negative action and reaction. He was in fact a typical incarnation and embodiment of a dualism, immortalized by the fertile fancy of Robert Louis Stevenson, in his story of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” While on the one hand he had an apparently irresistible and monomaniacal cunning in robbing his fellow men by monopolizing all the necessities of life, crushing with hellish unscrupulousness all competition in every channel of industry, and strewing his wake with industrial wrecks,—on the other hand he busied himself with the erection of hospitals and churches, and in endowing colleges with a princely liberality, commensurate to his other nature.

Emerson, the philosopher, says “The whole universe is so, and so every one of its parts,” that “an inevitable dualism bisects nature,” each thing being a half and suggesting its complement. As the mammoth Californian redwood tree, which with its towering height looks overpoweringly stupendous when compared with the tiny otaheite orange or dwarf Japanese plant, so was the difference in power of acquisitiveness and possibilities of dispensation between this colossus compared with ordinary mortals.

The real motive of his charity could not be divined; whether it was because, pricked by a guilty conscience, he used this means as a palliative for his sins, or whether he was entirely oblivious of wrong-doing and was prompted only by a frank desire for doing good, was never determined. But at any rate after his death it was found that he had donated his palaces, with munificent endowment funds, to establish this educational institution for females. Moreover, it is not my intention to write a biography of this dual monster of money-maniac and philanthropist, for his deeds are written on the graves and sorrowing hearts of his victims, as well as in the grateful remembrance and esteem of his beneficiaries.

Besides, we are told that God works good even through the agency of the devil, and if he really had been a satellite of Satan, the great usefulness and wide influence for good of the Seminary demonstrated the veracity of the above statement.