Читать книгу I don't know, do you? онлайн

3 страница из 22

CREEDS AGAINST CIVILIZATION

NE hundred fifty years ago, there was not a single white man in what is now Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. What is now the most flourishing part of the United States was then as little known as the country in the heart of Africa itself. It was not until Seventeen Hundred Seventy-six that Boone left his home in North Carolina to become the first settler in Kentucky; and the pioneers of Ohio did not settle that territory until twenty years later.

Canada belonged to France one hundred fifty-three years ago, and Washington was a modest Virginia Colonel, and the United States was the most loyal part of the British Empire, and scarcely a speck on the political horizon indicated the struggle that in a few years was to lay the foundation of the greatest republic in the world.

One hundred fifty years ago there were but four small newspapers in America; steam-engines had not been imagined; and locomotives and railroads, and telegraphs and postal cards, and friction-matches, and revolvers and percussion-caps, and breechloading-guns and Mauser rifles, and stoves and furnaces, and gas and electricity and rubber shoes, and Spaulding's glue, and sewing-machines and anthracite coal, and photographs, and kerosene-oil, free schools, and spring-beds and hair-mattresses, and lever-watches and greenbacks were unknown. The spinning-wheel was in almost every family, and clothing was spun and woven and made up in the family; and the printing-press was a cumbrous machine worked by hand.