William C. Lobenstine

“ There is something fearful in the fact that there is nothing between destruction and the ocean tossed mariner but some frail planks which half a dozen accidents may dislodge and send him to the deep bottom of the pitiless sea. Such is man in his wild career in pursuit of wealth and power that he will entrust his life, his all, to a frail bark which the winds may toss on rocks and breakers from which there is no salvation. ”

“ Beautiful in every scene that meets our eye—the streamlet which meanders through pleasant valleys by picturesque hills ornamented by vines, with the contented peasant gathering the grapes. Mountains with their highest peaks covered with everlasting snows meet our looks in the far off horizon and crown with sublimity the rural beauties of the hills and vales at their foot. Man himself feels stronger and of higher spirits in the Spring of the year, the purity of the air and the balmy smell which emanates from flowers, shrubs and trees exhilarate the soul and body of every animated organic being. ”

“ All will say America is no more dependent on anybody but themselves and nature's laws. Politics and love to live forced legislators to treat friendly with despots and now this voice of justice and humanity calls them to throw off this so long maintained mask of amity to tyrannical systems and to declare themselves at once for mankind and fellowmen. The voice of nature is mighty and omnipotent. ”

“ Although in the tropics, we have enjoyed till now cool and extremely pleasant weather with beautiful star and moonlight nights and the bright expanse of ocean round us, with our vessel like a thing of life moving along upon its bosom, and in the dark, at twilight before the moon is up, what splendid sight is revealed to the traveller of the sea. ”

“ We are now encamped about six miles Northwards of the Little Blue, and although late in the day we have on account of the rainy and stormy weather, not as yet decamped.
May the twenty-third. It is Sunday to-day and the great bright luminary of the day is peeping over the horizon in its full splendor, and eternal youthfulness animating the whole creation and endowing it with new strength and vigor. ”

“ An invention which is as remarkable for its intensity of light as the Middle Ages for their impenetrable darkness and consequent superstition. This is the invention of printing by John Gutenberg of Metz in Germany in fourteen hundred and forty. By one sublime thought which struck the mind of a single man or more properly, by the divine inspiration of a single human being, benefits as great and incalculable were bestowed upon mankind as universal space itself is infinite and beyond human calculation. ”

“ She calls us up out of our dreamlike indifference to honorable participation in the fate of our fellowmen and makes it our duty to stand in defense of her laws on this planet and home of intellectual creatures. Let us throw off then our fastidious way of action and exert one and all of us the strength both physical and moral, for universal happiness and so lay by this the road to world's perfection. ”

“ The great enterprise of New York at present upon which succeeding ages will bestow all gratitude is the building of a grand Park where the thousands of this city—the rich, the poor, the highly born and lowly may pass moments of pleasure and rest from the noise and turmoil of the city and acquire strength and cheerfulness for the hard tasks of every day life. ”

“ The road leads alongside of it, crossing it some twenty times. We traveled on till three o'clock when we struck the foot of a mountain three miles this side of town and encamped for the night.
The Salt Lake Valley is built by high mountains whose summits reach into the clouds, forming with its craggy sides a picturesque and, joined with the beauty of the valley, a lovely scene. The valley is thirty miles wide and some seventy-five to one hundred miles long. Within its mountainous enclosure it contains some of the most fertile and beautiful country ever looked on by men. ”

“ If Napoleon was great as conqueror, he was equally despicable for the misuse he made of the confidence entrusted in him by the people, and instead of perfecting the rights and liberties of the nation, he cheated them of these very objects given to his care and usurped the government. ”

“ In the Springtime of life, his beauty is of the noblest kind and life is constant happiness. As time rolls on his body and mind mature, he becomes wiser and abler and in this estate [Pg 71] of manhood acts and operates for himself and fellowmen. This is the most useful part of man's career and as he grows older he loses the vigour he formerly possessed and at the end—in the Winter of his life droops down, grows weaker and weaker until finally his career is run and he has to join Mother Earth again to serve some new purpose in the organization of nature. ”

“ Coast. It forms a perfect elbow in shape and is therefore perfectly water locked and on that account offers safe mooring to vessels. How strange the contrast between a Spanish and an American town—the latter enjoying all the health and vigor and activity of youth, progress. In the former it is an eternal stand still, no activity of any kind, no display of the least spirit or energy is to be met with here. Action, perpetual action, is the characteristic of the American. The want of all life, of the least healthy action so necessary to the existence of a people is to be found in Mexico. ”

“ Looking back from the point we started and considering once more both hereditary despots and usurpated despots, so will we certainly not think so hard of one who has got that power by inheritance, or who was raised from infancy to this sole object of keeping the people down, in poverty, and slavery, as of a usurpator, who has imbibed principles of liberty and equality, sympathises with his brothers, and becomes then their flatterer, and by abuse of his mental faculties and moral sentiments, with a happy change of circumstances, their master and commander. ”

“ On the morning of the sixth we started on our journey, and after passing a river which is difficult to cross we ascended for the first time the plateau this side of the Missouri. After having got up to a height of about fifty feet above the level of the Missouri River, a magnificent scene was displayed to our view, resembling very much my native country—Germany. The whole ground is prairie land, running off in slight undulations to the horizon and bounded in its Eastern progress by the bed of the Missouri and the mountain chains on the left. ”

“ America being, however, the most liberal, and by that the most powerful government in the world, if it is her duty to stick to the act which our forefathers have made, there is still the other side of the argument to consider, to arrive to a proper result. Justice is the first law of nature and as all of us expect to get justice done from our neighbors, and especially the government we have chosen out of our minds, so humanity demands to see our brothers, however distant, equalized in the same way. ”

“ This country, but for the extreme heat and the malaria it must necessarily create from its numerous swamps, would be almost a Paradise to live in. If Americans should ever possess it and be able to live there, they in truth will make it indeed what it seems intended for by nature—one of the loveliest spots the world knows. Aspinwall is a new place and traces its origin to the discovery of the gold mines in California and the subsequent travel across the Isthmus. It is principally inhabited by natives of Central America, some French and some Americans. ”

“ After leaving school, he studied for nearly a year with a country doctor, a relative of his, going about with him and assisting in many ways, but developed no liking for the profession and so gave it up and, together with his brother Henry, decided to come to America whither Frederic had already gone. This was in eighteen hundred and forty-nine, when a new spirit was abroad in Germany and when people looked to this country both as a land of freedom and also as a place where one could almost literally pick up gold and silver on the streets. ”

“ As maintained before, the exhausted position of America, which only could follow so great and sacrificing a struggle as that of the war of independence, obliged our forefathers to make friendly treaties [Pg 7] with the foreign powers, to avoid if possible another blow upon their rights and liberties maintained so gloriously with England. But what is our strength at this moment? Are we still so feeble? Still so dependent on beings who are the scourge of mankind and deface the earth with cruelty and tyranny? We all certainly will say no. ”

“ In time all this changes to yellow as their life runs out and their vitality, their sweet smell are dried up by the tropical heat of the South to rest and gather life and nutriment anew from Mother Earth.
Man, too, undergoes this change that everything in nature is subjected to. His life compares favourably with the changes in the vegetable world. First, tender and weak he gains care and attention, strength of body and mind. ”

“ Even Page and Bacon, one of the best and wealthiest banking houses in the Union, has suspended payment which, however, is more ascribed to the detention of gold shipments from California than to deficiency of funds. The main cause for all this embarrassment in the money market appears to lie in the heavy export of gold to England in exchange for English manufactures and in the extravagance of our bankers, brokers and merchant princes in the last ten years. Nothing but a stoppage in the import of foreign manufacture and a more industrious sort of living will save this country from bankruptcy. ”

“ The grand and wonderful effect of a great unknown first cause meets us at every side—and while admiring the former we wonder at the magnitude and goodness of the latter. We try to penetrate the darkness which veils that unknown from our sight and behold the prima facie—till now only known by its reflections. ”

“ But times have changed, out of that spark of freedom which fell among the population of this continent has come a powerful government, illuminating, with its might, the whole world, and whose physical powers are sufficient to crush all enemies to dust and raise downtrodden, oppressed and dishumanized mankind and brothers up to their by nature determined position of equality and fraternity. ”

“ Mother that received us when we, flushed and exhausted arrived home to refresh and rest ourselves, who would lay her hand upon our forehead to dry the perspiration and brush aside our hair to restore our infant beauty, and, with those benign eyes looking upon us, would with her lips which always were so fond of kissing—express her fears that we would over-heat ourselves and take sick. ”

“ The weather in general is just warm enough to make it pleasant to work—which in itself is pain enough without having it doubled by exposure to a scorching sun. A pleasant breeze being wafted up from the smooth waters of the Pacific moderates the climate to a genial warmth which only for want of sufficient rain would be as beautiful as any person could wish for. ”

“ Despotism is despicable in its perpetrator and at all times a disgrace to human beings, depriving them perforce of their inalienable rights and their moral esteem for themselves and bringing them down on common ground with slaves. ”

“ Napoleon knew how to play the deceiver well enough to keep the people in their happy dreams. He knew how to flatter them by giving them all visible power, but he showed by his future way of action that he only played the hypocrite and that his outward course only served him to attain his inward higher object which was nothing short of grasping the nation and enslaving his own countrymen, as all other nations, which were possible for him, he conquered. ”

“ Who would and can deny that the early trainings of men lay the foundations to their further field of action? Therefore, when princes become the heirs of absolute governments, who can expect them to act differently than the Southern man does to his slaves? The latter, who was brought up among the family of mankind, and has accepted principles common to them, is much more to blame for his tyranny than a sovereign who was raised alone isolated from his fellowmen by a belief in his divine [Pg 4] origin and who never imagined, therefore, nor ever dreamed of the least equality with mankind. ”

“ Still there are many fertile spots in the valleys watered by mountain streams which intersect the country—heading in the snow clad mountains and pouring their icy waters like veins into the heart of the country to give vigor and health to the country in their proximity. A traveler therefore can see in one day's journey and less both the budding and refreshing Spring and the yellow Autumn, the former in the valleys, the latter in the higher parts of the land. ”

“ True, the beauty is grand and sublime, but it is so without divinity connected with it. It is not something beyond nature but a planetary phenomenon following the great arrangements, the great and eternal laws of Mother Nature. ”

“ Is it not better so to have the mind of the to-man-grown boy and the mind of the girl who has reached womanhood unfettered by stubborn prejudices, perhaps with hatred against its fellow creatures, than to have it in its infancy so directed as to make it almost impossible to allow them different views and opinions from those early implanted upon the infant mind? ”

“ If ever by some natural change this country shall be blessed by seasonable rains through the Summer, it will undoubtedly exert a most beneficial influence upon the soil of the land and make agricultural business more permanent and profitable and vastly benefit the mining community and make living itself more pleasant and comfortable on the shores of the Pacific. There is a certain fact which manifests itself in new settled countries—namely, that the amount of rain which falls every year increases in proportion to the cultivation and irrigation of the soil. ”