Opinion: “From their loins sprang the race”

GIVE THANKSFrom the Black Sea to the Adriatic the land is filled with the graves of the victims of battle and pestilence. While the great powers of Europe will probably not engage in actual battle over the carving of Turkey, yet their maxim is ‘the best security for peace is the most tremendous preparation for war,’ and they are building dreadnoughts, and equipping arsenals, and withdrawing hundreds of thousands of men from productive industry and drilling them as soldiers. In Southeastern Europe the air is murky with the smoke of battle and thick with the fragments of dissolving empire. In our own favored land peace and plenty abound. America is favored by Almighty Power. ‘Around her thrones totter and dynasties decay.The soil she guards alone escapes the earthquake.’ It is only in the United States of America that the day we celebrate on this last Thursday in November is a national holiday. Christmas is celebrated wherever civilization erects her altars, and the cross that Constantine saw written with a sunbeam on the clouds invited humanity to worship the Savior of mankind. New Year’s Day is a holiday in other than Christian lands. There are saints’ days and the birthdays of patriots and heroes which are observed in every land in various ways. But our Thanksgiving Day is a day both of feasting and praying. It is a religious anniversary in the morning when you listen to a sermon, and it is quite secular in the afternoon when the roasted turkey looms in front of you. William H. Seward, uphon his return from his journey around the world, said, ‘There are in all the East no homes.’ America is the land of homes and Thanksgiving is a home holiday. On Christmas day an Englishman eats roasted goose and partakes of that mince pie which Charles Lamb described as ‘moist and indigestible at the bottom, dry and indigestible on top, with untold horrors in the middle.’ Nor goose, nor beef, nor pork, nor mutton is admitted to the American table on Thanksgiving Day. The ‘piece de resistance’ is that noble bird, the turkey. H ranks next to the eagle in American ornithology. He obtained his name because it was erroneously supposed that he originally came from Turkey. The glass-eyed young collegian, home for Thanksgiving, will tell his astounded father and gaping mother and sisters, that the meleagris gallopavo is a gallinaceous fowl of purely American origin and only in America can he be found in a wild state. The characteristics of the turkey are such as belong to the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave.’ He is a self-respecting, self-appreciative fowl. He is a strutter from top-knot to claw. When he descends from a tree-top he arches his noble neck, spreads his gorgeous tail, and walks majestically down the barnyard, giving voice in Wagnerian tones to his matin [sic] song of ‘gobble, gobble,’ let all the rest of the feathered tribe slink to obscurity in his presence. On Thanksgiving Day, pumpkin pie, along with Indian pudding, constitutes the orthodox dessert. The pudding recalls the field of maize, waving its tassels in the October sunshine. The pie brings to mind the golden globes raised between the rows of corn. They do not raise Indian corn in the fields of the effete despotism of Europe, and of Indian puddings there are none. They do have occasionally, at Vefours and the Trois Freres in Paris, out of compliment to American customers, a concoction which is announced on the menu as ‘pie de pumpkin.’ But pumpkin pie is the one thing that a French chef cannot cook. The pastry part is all right, but ‘de pumpkin’ is flabby and flat, and resembles sweetened sawdust more than anything else. The memories and the thoughts evoked on Thanksgiving Day are not merely of a gustatory and epicurean character. Through the mists of centuries we behold the originators of the New England Thanksgiving, the band who landed on Plymouth Rock and exclaimed: ‘Mitres and thrones are man-created thingsWe own no sceptre but the king of kings.’ From their loins sprang the race which, a century and more later, spoke through the lips of the patriot Adams and said: ‘Thy spirit, Independence, let me share,Lord of the lion heart and eagle eye,Unto the storm I will my bosom bare,Nor heed the blast that howls along the sky.’ We recall the Thanksgiving which succeeded the day when Cornwallis placed his conquered sword in the grasp of Washington. Again the guns of the Constitution silence the batteries of the Guerriere. Again the dying Lawrence looks up to the bannered stars and cries, ‘Don’t give up the ship.’ Again the bullets fired by Jackson’s riflemen compel the surrender of the veterans of England. Again old Rough and Ready wrests a Pacific empire from Santa Ana. It is in this greatest city of that empire that we gather around the festive board today and thank God that we are dwellers in God’s country; that we are successors of the argonauts of-- ‘The days of old, the days of gold,The days of fortin-nine.’ ‘Theirs,’ said Ned Marshall, ‘was the antiquated Homeric spirit. It was their pride and boast that they were able to win the greatest of all trimphs, the victory over themsleves; that they were able to preserve order without law; that they were able to maintain justice without tribunals; that their possession of absolute personal independence never degenerated into selfishness, nor the almost savage liberty of a country without law into cruelty or oppression. Shall we, who in conscious fulfilment of a great mission, brought method out of chaos, and cultivated the flowers of justice and safety, yield to lesser dangers and baser temptation? Shall we soil the splendor of the past.’ Today we return thanks to the God who has preserved this nation and made of it the greatest, freest and most prosperous power on earth.