Occidentals

“ Oriental life and society, especially in the Southern nations, stand in violent contrast with the multitudinous detail, the secular stability, and the vast average of comfort of the Western nations. Life in the East is fierce, short, hazardous, and in extremes. ”

“ They saw what every Westerner sees to-day,—illimitable reaches of prairie and ravine, forested hills sloping to mighty rivers, and open meadow-lands watered by streams looped like a ribbon. They saw a land waiting for its people, wealth waiting for possessors, an empire waiting for the nation builders. ”

“ I like to study pictures of the East, and of the earliest period of the cultivation of our race in opposition to the West—that promised land which I am approaching with a thousand questions in my soul. ”

“ If you wish to know what the West has gained from contact with the East, even when they met sword in hand, look around you; most of the fruit trees that enrich your fields, the vine which gladdens the heart, the silk and cotton that adorn your houses and your persons, these are the spoils of your Eastern wars; sugar and coffee, the cultivation of which has changed the political balance of the world, were brought into Europe from the East, the one by yourselves, the other by the Arabs, when they made themselves masters of Spain. ”

“ All you need to do to steak or fish or fowl is to fry it. The art of selection, arrangement, combination are still mysteries of the decadent East. The West is above these things—the new West—God bless it! ”

“ Would it not be strange, if an Occidental education, continually exemplified by an Occidental civilization, had not wrought upon an Oriental such a metamorphosis in his inward nature as to make him feel and act as though he were a being coming from a different world, when he confronted one so diametrically different? ”

“ The new life of the West has reacted all the while—who shall say how powerfully?—upon the older life of the East; and yet the East has moulded the West as if she sent forward to it through every decade of the long process the chosen impulses and suggestions of history. ”

“ The East has swept over this colony of the West. And still its generations pass on, rhythmically swinging; slaves of Nature, not, as in the West, rebels against her; cyclical as her seasons and her stars; infinite as her storms of dust ”

“ The land from which I come did at one time strive to extend human knowledge, but that was many centuries ago. It is now the privilege of the West to lead in this work. I would fain hope, and I am sure I am echoing your sentiments, that a time may come when the East, too, will take her part in this glorious undertaking; and that at no distant time it shall neither be the West nor the East, but both the East and the West, that will work together, each taking her share in extending the boundaries of knowledge, and bringing out the manifold blessings that follow in its train. ”

“ The North invents, the South supplies the tools, the East the hands, the West the patrons and critics of the work, while out of the yellow heart of the city comes the gold, the incentive to the North, South, and East. ”

“ I seem to live in the heart of two distinct civilizations, those of the East and the West, but the East is my spirit's fatherland. My mind still turns for companionship to the great ones of the Past, the heroines of my country's history. ”

“ But the absurdity of the West is the living reality of the East. There we may still find all the chief races which have ever occupied the country, still remaining distinct, still keeping separate tongues, and those for the most part, their own original tongues. ”

“ The West, save where special interests centre (as in those pockets of silver where men’s eyes catch as it were an eager gleam from the very ore itself) : the West is in less danger of sectionalization. Who shall say in that wide country where one region ends and another begins, or, in that free and changing society, where one class ends and another begins? ”

“ From that moment our politics became national, and the fate of each portion of our country was thenceforth in some sort dependent upon the welfare of every other. Each section had its own work to do; the east won independence while the west began to conquer the continent, yet the deeds of each were of vital consequence to the other. The Continentals gave the west its freedom, and took in return, for themselves and their children, a share of the land that had been conquered and held by the scanty bands of tall backwoodsmen. ”

“ The East at its best has weighed conduct in delicate balances and traced the play of cause and effect in character far, far beyond the West; it has been content with simple things and found its true wealth in the inner life. ”

“ What is the spirit, what is the civilization of the West? I have not the presumption to expect to answer these large questions to any one’s satisfaction—least of all to my own—but if I may be permitted to talk about them familiarly, in the manner that one speaks to his friends of what interested him most in a journey, and with flexibility in passing from one topic to another, I shall hope to contribute something to a better understanding between the territories of a vast empire. ”

“ The problem of the West is nothing less than the problem of American development. A glance at the map of the United States reveals the truth. To write of a "Western sectionalism," bounded on the east by the Alleghanies, is, in itself, to proclaim the writer a provincial. What is the West? What has it been in American life? To have the answers to these questions, is to understand the most significant features of the United States of to-day.
The West, at bottom, is a form of society, rather than an area. ”

“ The Orient is already feeling the thrill of renewed life. It is responding to the touch of the youth and vigor of the West and becoming rejuvenated; it is drawing closer and closer in its eagerness for the warmth of new interests. The West is no longer alone in seeking a union; the East is coming to the West. ”

“ It constitutes the key-conception of historical progress, and is the very life of that highest stage of this which we designate and praise by the name of Western Civilisation. It is at the mental summons of this ideal, that the West as a stadium in historic progress emerges from the hoary and impassive East; and the entire history of the West as divergent from the oriental spirit, as the scene of energetic human improvement, the scene of the victory of man over Nature and over his merely natural self, has its controlling and explanatory motive in this ideal alone. ”

“ Nothing could have been more natural than that, as the West hove in sight larger and richer, the cry for better means of communication between the East and the West should have grown louder and more incessant. ”

“ Here in the West you are near the centre of a vast empire, you feel its mighty pulse, the throb and heartbeat of its immense and growing strength. Some of you have seen this great civilization actually grow on the vacant prairies, in the unoccupied wilderness, on the sandy shores of the inland seas. ”

“ Just as, while we are striving to found a new Europe in which the thought of the Occidental races shall be common to all, we wish each race, far from losing its character and forgetting its past glory, to bring what is most glorious and lay it on the common altar of humanity. ”

“ But when the separation of East and West became wider, and the Latin-speaking Western Empire began to live with an intellectual life of its own, its deference to the East was all at once exchanged for the agitation of a number of questions entirely foreign to Eastern speculation. ”

“ To-day the historical societies of many Western States issue each year a volume filled with material of great interest—matter that will be of enormous value to the historian who shall set down the story of the development of the West. ”

“ The history of the West is the history of the advance of thought, of the rise and decay of institutions, to which the greatest individuals are more or less subordinate. The history of the East is the annals of personalities; justice and energy in a ruler, not political principles, are what impress the Oriental imagination. ”

“ But the news has reached me even here that in the West you seek a moral standard, and this quest always fills me with wonder. There are priests among you, I can see that, and soldiers, and fishermen, and artists and princes and folk who labor in the fields--now do you expect all these men, living in different conditions of life, to live under the same rule? I am afraid that the East and the West will never understand each other. ”

“ Nay, we may honourably go further South, and possess the Atlantic and Pacific slopes of the Southern continent, extending the area of freedom at every step. We may carry thither the Anglo-Saxon vigour and enterprise, the old love of liberty, the love also of law; the best institutions of the present age—ecclesiastical, political, social, domestic. ”

“ However they may be settled, the great fact will remain essentially the same, that the two continents of this Western Hemisphere shall yet bear up a stupendous social, political, and religious structure, wrought by the American mind, moulded and coloured by the hues of American thought, and animated and united by an American soul. ”

“ The East is submissive, the West is creative; The East is conservative, the West is progressive; The East is intuition, the West is reason; The East is spiritual, the West is empirical; The East is humanistic, the West is scientific ”

“ The Occidental have a milky Cast, and want the polished Gloss of the Oriental. They are very plentiful in many Parts of America; as also in France, Italy, and Scotland; and we meet with them every Day in our Oysters and Muscles here, but seldom of any great Beauty. ”

“ But as soon as the country began to feel its life in every limb with the coming of peace, it began to speak in the varying accents of all the different sections—North, East, South, West, and Farthest West ”

“ The wealth of the South soon began to outstrip that of the North. Education and refinement followed wealth. Whilst the civilization of the North was coarse, and practical, that of the South was more intellectual, and refined. ”

“ The old countries of the East, with their worn-out civilization and worn-out soil, offered no inducements comparable with the barbarous but young and fertile West, where to the ecclesiastic the most lovely and inviting lands were open. ”

“ The reason is that, like any other continent, though, in its incidentals, it is the history of a vast region, inhabited by peoples possessing certain traits of physical affinity and living for a few short spells under administrative unity yet, in its essentials, it is the history of many separate countries which have, throughout the ages, been inhabited by many distinct peoples, with different languages, philosophies, and civilizations, and organized for the most part into sovereign states, ruled by their own kings or emperors. ”

“ But both North and South have a fiercer and more doubtful fight with the forces of ignorance than they waged with each other during the bloody years which chastened the opening life of this generation. ”

“ Sentimental people in the East will talk of the romance of the West, and of these simple, brave pioneers who have wrung a living from the soil, and are properly proud of the rude little towns that mark their conquest over nature. ”

“ The simplicity of the life of the common people, their freedom from fashions that fetter the Occidental, their independence of furniture in their homes, their few wants and fewer necessities—these, when contrasted with the endless needs and demands of an Occidental, are accepted by some as evidences of a higher stage of civilization than prevails in the West. ”

“ All the intelligence of the North, and a great portion of that of the South, felt the deepest interest in our success, not merely as descendants of the mother country, but also because they recognised the war in which we were engaged as a struggle in the cause of liberty. ”

“ The Occidental’s energy for combat was lulled within him, and the Occidental’s individualistic tendencies seemed to stretch themselves in a long yawn expressive of an amused and tolerant observation free from striving; and, for an Occidental, this mood is dangerous. ”

“ Within this vast empire there are geographic provinces, separate in physical conditions, into which American colonization has flowed, and in each of which a special society has developed, with an economic, political and social life of its own. ”

“ But threatening voices came from the North—the echoes of the sentiments of the civilised world repenting of its evil pierced their ears, and they found their feet were of clay, and that they were nodding to their fall in the midst of their power. ”

“ The East has, indeed, given the key-note to most of our popular thinking, but the West has invariably furnished the chief chorus, and spontaneously extemporized every variation whose brilliant originality has elicited thrilling applause. ”

“ The West had turned back towards the East, and, although the intent was hostile, the minds of the western men had been fecundated, their imagination fired by contact with the mother of all religions and all cultures. ”

“ I agree that there may be circumstances, prejudices, and feelings which render assistance in the East by the only country which can give it in the East a question of difficulty and doubt—a question which must be weighed in every balance and looked at from every point of view ”

“ Thus, in the States bordering on the Atlantic coast, which are more closely in touch with the Old World, there is, as a rule, a very definite public opinion on European questions, while the West remains more or less indifferent. ”