We may cramp her energies and distort her form, or we may make her a rival even of the Empire State of the Atlantic.
Whitelaw Reid
The Public Record
Whitelaw Reid was an American politician, diplomat and newspaper editor, as well as the author of Ohio in the War, a popular work of history.
gutenberg.org
If ever a route across the Isthmus shall be opened, California will then be one of the most interesting commercial situations in the world; it would in that case be the rendezvous for all vessels engaged in the trade between Europe and…
Let no man fancy that these sometimes exuberant expressions of a noble and far-seeing faith by your own predecessors and by a prescient foreigner have been revived in derision or even in doubt.
These were great men, far-seeing, courageous, patriotic, the men of Forty-nine, who in such lofty spirit and with such high hope laid the foundation of this empire on the Pacific.
And yet there are Californians of this day who profess to shrink in alarm from the remoteness and inaccessibility of our new possessions!
Or is it only that there are strident voices from California, sounding across the Sierras and the Rockies, that misrepresent and shame a State whose sons are not unworthy of their fathers?
The arm of the Californian has not been shortened, that he cannot reach out.
The salt has not left him, that he cannot occupy and possess the great ocean that the Lord has given him.
Nor has he forgotten the lesson taught by the history of his own race (and of the greatest nations of the world), that oceans no longer separate--they unite.
Contiguous land gives a nation cohesion; but it is the water that brings other nations near.
The continent divides you from customers beyond the mountains; but the ocean unites you with the whole boundless, mysterious Orient.
It will make an end forever of Spain in this hemisphere.