President Woodrow Wilson on the occasion of the 100th Anniversary
of the 
beginning
of field work within the United States Coast Survey. Address delivered
on April 6, 1916.
Introduction
by Ernest Lester Jones, Director of the United States Coast and Geodetic
Survey:
Realizing
to the fullest extent the many cares already oppressing our next speaker,
I yet had the temerity to ask him to be with us to-night and speak.
He very kindly granted my request, only asking that he speak last,
so that in case anybody “started anything” he might have
his opportunity; he is the best judge of whether anything has been
“started.”
The
Coast Survey had its beginning under President Jefferson, of Virginia,
and it is a very happy coincidence that we round out the century under
another President from the State of Virginia. I feel it the greatest
honor to introduce to you the President of the United States.
Mr.
Minister, Mr. Superintendent, ladies and gentlemen, I had another
reason for asking to come last. I remember reading with appreciation
in the preface of a volume of essays written by a very witty English
writer a passage to this effect, “The pleasure with which a
man reads his own books is largely dependent upon how much of them
has been written by somebody else;” and I have found that my
enjoyment of making speeches after dinner is almost directly in proportion
to the amount of inspiration that I can derive from others.
It was
manifestly impossible for me to make such preparation for addressing
you to-night as I should have wished to make in order to show my very
great respect and admiration for this service of the Government. I
can only say that I have come here for the purpose of expressing that
admiration. I have been very much interested in the speeches that
I have heard here to-night, not only because of what they contained
but also because of the many implications which were to be drawn from
them. I was very much interested indeed in the excellent address of
the representative of the free and admirable Republic of Switzerland,
as well as to the many other countries from which we draw so much
of our vitality and so much of the scientific work which has been
accomplished in America.
As he
was speaking, I was reminded (if there are Pennsylvanians present,
I hope they will forgive this story) of a toast mischievously offered
at a banquet in Philadelphia by a gentleman who was not himself a
Pennsylvanian. He said he proposed the memory of the three most distinguished
Pennsylvanians - Benjamin Franklin, of Massachusetts; James Wilson,
of Scotland; and Albert Gallatin, of Switzerland. I dare say that
in many American communities similar toasts could very truly and with
historical truth be offered. And I myself had the privilege of sitting
under one of the distinguished Swiss scholars to whom reference was
made, Doctor Arnold Guyot, under whom I pretended to study geology.
Doctor Guyot was not responsible for its not being carried beyond
the stage of pretense.
I feel
myself in a certain sense in familiar company to-night because a very
great part of my life has been spent in association with men of science.
I have often wished, particularly since I entered public life, that
there was some moral process parallel to the process of triangulation,
so that the whereabouts, intellectually and spiritually, of some persons
could be discovered with more particularity. Yet as I listened to
the Secretary of Commerce, I suspected that he was priding himself
upon the discovery of a process by which he had discovered the whereabouts
of a great many committees of Congress and a great many other persons
connected with the process of appropriating public moneys. I have
a certain sympathy with those committees of Congress which in investigating
the Coast and Geodetic Survey have found that the Superintendent had
the great advantage of knowing all about the service and they the
great disadvantage of knowing nothing about it, because, as I have
said, I have spent a great part of my life in association with men
of science and, never having been a man of science, I have at least
learned the discretion of keepin my opinion on scientific subjects
to myself.
I have
not had association particularly with the very exact and singularly
well-informed brother of a distinguished gentleman present. General
Scott has a brother who is a member of the faculty of Princeton University,
and Professor William B. Scott is one of the most provoking men I
have ever known. He not only asserts opinions and delivers himself
of information upon almost every known subject, but the provoking
thing about him is he generally knows what he is talking about. A
good talker who volunteers opinions on all subjects ought to be expected
in fairness to his fellow men to make a certain large and generous
portion of mistakes, because you can at least catch him napping, but
Professor Scott is one of those men who successfully - I have sometimes
told him suspected adroitly - avoided the pitfalls of eminent conversationalists
like himself; but association with such men has taught me a very great
degree of discretion and, therefore, I am not going to express any
opinion whatever about the work of the Coast and Geodetic Survey;
but I am going to give myself the privilege, for it is a real privilege,
of saying this: This one of the few branches of the public service
in which the motives of those who are engaged cannot be questioned.
There is something very intensely appealing to the imagination in
the intellectual ardor which men bestow upon scientific inquiry. No
social advantage can be gained by it. No pecuniary advantage can be
gained by it. In most cases no personal distinction can be gained
by it. It is one of the few pursuits in life which gets all its momentum
from pure intellectual ardor, from a love of finding out what the
truth is, regardless of all human circumstances - as if the mind wished
to put itself into intimate communication with the mind of the Almighty
itself. There is something in scientific inquiry which is eminently
spiritual in its nature. It is the spirit of man wishing to square
himself accurately with his environment not only, but also wishing
to get at the intimate interpretations of his relationship to his
environment; and when you think of what the Coast and Geodetic Survey
has been attempting to do - to make a sort of profile picture, a sort
of profile sketch, of the life of a nation, so far as that life is
physically sustained - you can see that what we have been doing has
been, so to say, to test and outline the whole underpinning of a great
civilization, and just as the finding of all the outlines of the earth’s
surface that underlie the sea is a process of making the pathways
for the great intercourse which has bound nations together, so the
work that we do upon the continent itself is the work of interpreting
and outlining the conditions which surround a great nation.
I can
illustrate it in this way, the way in which it appeals to my imagination:
I have always maintained that it was a great mistake to begin a history
of the United States intended for beginners by putting at the front
of the book a topographical map of this continent, or at any rate
of that portion of it which is occupied by the United States, because
if you begin with that you seem to begin to deal with children when
you deal with the first settlers. They knew nothing about it. They
expected to find the Pacific over the slope of the Alleghenies. They
expected to find some Eldorado at the sources of the first great river
whose mouth they entered upon the coast. They went groping for the
outlines of the continent like blind men feeling their way through
a jungle. They were as big men as we, as intelligent; they had as
full a grasp upon the knowledge of their time as we have upon the
knowledge of ours; but set the youngster in the school to watch these
men groping and he will get the impression that they were children
and pigmies. That is not the way to begin the history of the United
States. You will understand it only if you comprehend how little of
what the work of this department of the Government, for example, has
since disclosed was known to those then engaged in this great romantic
enterprise of peopling a new continent and building up a new civilization
in a new world.
So that
you have the picture of a service like this lifting the curtain that
before that time rested upon all the great spaces of nature. You remember
how in the early history of Virginia a little company of gentlemen
moved by a sort of scientific curiosity, and yet moved by a spirit
of adventure still more, penetrated no farther than to some of the
unknown fastnesses of the Allegheny Mountains and were thereafter
known as the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe -- given a sort of knighthood
of adventure because they went a little way upon the same quest upon
which you gentlemen have gone a great way.
So when
I stand in the presence of scientific men I seem to stand in the presence
of those who are given the privilege, the singular privilege, the
almost contradictory privilege, of following a vision of the mind
with open, physical eyes; making real the things that have been conjectural;
making substantial the things that have been intangible.
And
as the Secretary of Commerce has said, there is a great human side
to the things that you are doing. You are making it safe to bind the
world together with those great shuttles that we call ships that move
in and out and weave the fabric of international intercourse. You
are providing the machinery by which the web of humanity is woven.
It is only by these imaginative conceptions, it is only by visions
of the mind, that we are inspired. If we thought about each other
too much, our little jealousies, our rivalries, our smallnesses, our
weaknesses, there would be no courage left in our hearts.
Sometimes
when the day is done and the consciousness of the sordid struggle
is upon you, you go to bed wondering if the sun will seem bright in
the morning, the day worth while, but you have only to sweep these
temporary things away and to look back and see mankind working its
way, though ever [“never” is the word in the manuscript,
but the tone of this ending paragraph seems more consistent with the
word “ever”] so slowly, up the slow steps which it
has climbed to know itself and to know nature and nature’s God,
and to know the destiny of mankind, to have these little things seem
like the mere mists that creep along the ground, and have all the
courage come back to you by lifting your eyes to those blue heavens
where rests the serenity of thought.
