The New York herald., 1876-03-13
The Centennial and csntsnnlallsm.

Win Oeulehnlhl cigar. faSnlOn ue-
mands Centennial hat" and Centen-
nial scarf" Moods of conviviality must be
supplied by Centennial drinks" The
politicians already talk about 20 Centennial
canvass" in which there shall be no candi-
dates in whose veins do not run the blue
blood of the Revolution. The booksellers
are profuse with Centennial literature"
and we have biographies, tales and all man.
ner of chronicles about the time that tried
mems souls. Every day almost is an ami
versary When we remember that we are to
have these anniversaries for five or six years
we may fancy what amount of patience is
necessary to help us along to the day when
we shall, we trust, commemorate the compile
ton of the constitution and the entrance of
Washington upon the Presidential Office.
But there is the comfort that it comes only
once in hundred years and that when we
are we'll through with this we shall have no
more in our time. If we keep going as we
do now the chance is that we shall have no
country to celebrate" in hundred years.
We may make as much of it as we can while
we have one. This if gloomy reflection,
is natural enough when we sec what we see
in Washington and elsewhere. 1t is some
thing that our fathers would have never
dreamed as possible in the model Republic of
the globe-that a Secretary of War would be
confessed peculator and that we should have
an administration famous or infamous, as
the historian may view it, for the absence of
those virtues which shall be the theme of a
thousand orators between the anniversary of
our independence and the anniversaries
which will celebrate the various steps in the
formation of our government. 1t is some
thing that we have q public opinion that
does not hesitate to stamp upon the crime
of a Belknap. We have no such tradi-
tions in our history as are read in the his
tories of other nations at the time of the
formation of the government-evidence of o
laxity of moral principle which have no
counterpart in our records, dark as they
have been, since the war brought with it an
unsettling of the time honored principles of
the Republic. The crime of Belknaps has
a parallel in the folly of Hamilton, with this
exception, that if Secretary of the Treasury
were to confess to relations like those which
enabled a villanous husband to blackmail
Hamilton it would close his career. Whether
this is an evidence that we are better than
our grandfathers or little more prudish
we will not say; but since we are to have O
period of ancestral adulation at our own ex-
pense there is no harm in reminding the
lamented shades who gave us our Republic
that they had skeletons of their own even in
the closets of the most illustrious of them oil.
The Centennial is perhaps the most remark
able event that will happen in our day. We
have given our grandchildren something to
celebrate in the Proclamation Of Emancipa-
tion and the conquest of the Confederacy.
There are those now living, let us trust, Who
VIII see the Republic in blaze of glory over
the centennial of these events, and who, as
they listen with dimmed eyes and trembling
limbs to the praises of Lincoln and of Grant,
will recall how, with the big, wondering eyes
of childhood, they saw the celebration of to-
day. So if we owe something to our grand
fathers we have imposed a solemn debt upon
our grandchildren, for we question whether
after ages will not look with as much pride
saved the Union, as upon those who secured
an Independent sovereignty. The transcend
ent events of this century are the Declaration
of Independence and the Proclamation of
Emancipation. If we were content to cele-
brate the Declaration in a noisy fashion,
dedicating the Fourth of July to such cere-
monies as would show our gratitude to the
- u
plain but we are not moderate people in
anything, and the danger is that we may
lose our selfpossession and go mad with
Centennialism. Our imaginations begin to
run riot as to what will take place on the
Fourth of July. 1t would not surprise many
to see the sun stand still, even as it did be-
fore Joshua, and the absence of some such
mighty manifestation of Divine interest in
the Centennial would be apt to shake the
faith of devout patriotic souls.
We are working hard for the proper cele-
bration of the anniversary. We have vast
Exhibition Philadelphia is in an ecstasy
of anticipation and preparation. This ex-
treme tension, this feverish excitement, will
react The Exhibition will be crude and
vast. There will be a sense of bigness and
of national possibilities and evidences of
natural wealth; but we shall have no such dis
play as was seen in London or Paris, or even
in Vienna. We have more land, more mines
and wells, more varieties of soil and climate
we can show larger turnips and trees and
pumpkins and masses of ore; but what can
we show as evidences of art and in
dustry and taste to be compared with the
other exhibitions? Even as it now stands.
far distant Japan, coming out of the
night of centuries, the embodiment of q
civilization which yesterday was a blank,
will manifest a progress, ripeness in art