With Americans of Past and Present Days

History > Americas

Description

by J. J. Jussweand

DEDICATION

This day, thirteen years ago, a new French ambassador presented his credentials. The ambassador was not very old for an ambassador. The President was very young for a president, the youngest, in fact, the United States ever had. Both, according to custom, read set speeches, and there followed a first conversation, which had a great many successors, touching on a variety of subjects not connected, all of them, with diplomacy. In which talk took part the genial, learned, and warm-hearted author of the "Pike County Ballads" and of the Life of Lincoln, present at the meeting as Secretary of State of the United States.

This was the first direct impression the newcomer had of broad-minded, strenuous America, his earliest ones, as a child, having been derived from the illustrated weekly paper received by his family, and which offered to view fancy pictures of the battles between the bearded soldiers of Grant and Lee, the "poilus" of those days; another impression was from Cooper's tales, Deerslayer sharing with Ivanhoe the enthusiasm of the young people at the family hearth. Another American impression was received by them a little later, when, the Republic having been proclaimed, the street where the family had their winter home ceased to be called "Rue de la Reine" and became "Rue Franklin."

Thirteen years is a long space of time in an ambassador's life; it is not an insignificant one in the life of such a youthful nation as the United States; I have now witnessed the eleventh part of that life. Something like one-fourth or one-fifth of the population has been added since I began service here. There were forty-five States then instead of forty-eight; the commercial intercourse with France was half of what it is now; the tonnage of the American navy was less than half what it is at present; the Panama Canal was not yet American; the aeroplane was unknown; the automobile practically unused. Among artists, thinkers, humorists, critics, scientists, shone La Farge, McKim, Saint-Gaudens, William James, Mark Twain, Furness, Newcomb, Weir Mitchell, who, leaving a lasting fame, have all passed away.

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