Santa Fe new Mexican. [volume] (Santa Fe, N.M.) 1898-1951, 1900-11-27
A Hundred Years Difference.

The last Thanksgiving of the century
will be celebrated on Thursday of this
week. The progress that has been
made in those one hundred years, the
events that have TRANSFERRED, are stu
pendous and cannot be grasped in their
completeness by any single mind. Rail-
road, telegraph, steamship, electric
light are but a few of a vast number of
inventions of which no one dreamed at
the first Thanksgiving celebration of
this century.
Look back at the first session of con-
sress in the Nations capital one hundred
years ago. Washington had just been
founded, practically in a swamp. 1t
was a struggling village in the woods
ridiculed by visitors. One American
who had the temerity to prophesy that
at the end of the century it would be the
capital of a nation with so, 900, 900 peo-
pie was laughed to scorn. And yet the
reality has outrun the utmost hopes.
The city is in many respects the most
splendid capital in the world. The ma
tion is the most prosperous and power
full On earth.
In that year 1900, a little sloop had
sailed up the Potomac with Il few boxes
of records and some minor officials.
Says a recent writer:
"John Marshall, Oliver Wolcott,
Samuel Dexter, and Benjamin Stoddert,
brave in cooked hats, powdered wigs,
and %broadcloth coats, drove into town
and set their few clerks to work in the
state, treasury, war and navy depart
ments. After getting lost in the woods
on the way from Baltimore, the presi-
dent and his family had occupied the
unfinished White House, in whose great
east room Mrs. Adams all that winter
dried her washing. Members of congress
came by twos and threes, mostly on
horseback, and on the third Monday in
November a quorum was present.
ITO most Europeans and many edu-
Gated Americans the United States then
seemed as far from being a nation as its
capital from being a city. The repub-
lies western boundary was the Mississi-
ppi. 1t was cut off from the gulf of
Mexico by the domains of Spain and
France. Within four years British
troops had still held its soil at Detroit.
American merchants paid tribute to the
Barbary corsairs and American seamen
were enslaved by British press gangs.
For more than a year it had actually
been at war with France in the West
Indian seas.
Nor was the domestic condition en-
couraging. The interest on the public
debt was in arrears and the currency
disordered. The total population was
little more than that of Illinois today.
The laws of congress were openly re-
sisted, and the people were rem by fac
tions. The party which denounced
Wavne's victorious troops as ''mercenary
ragamufins" and a naval officer who cut
down a sailor DESERVING his post in action
as a murderer had just elected Thomas
Jefferson president on a platform de-
cIaring that states could nullify national
laws. Virginia was openly preparing
for secession, and New England editors
wrote that ''the Potomac, the Delaware,
or the Hudson, like the Rhine," would
''soon part hostile nations"
In a few days there will assemble in
the anne capitol the lawgivers Of 3,727,-
74S square miles, representing more than
76, 900, 900 people so firmly united that
they would regard the suggestions of
civil "a and disunion so common in 1900
as the rawlings of madmen. Then the
American flag tloated over but l6 states
and two territories. Now it waves from
ocean to ocean, from tropic to frozen
seas, in islands which then only a few
seamen had ever seen, and
on its glorious folds the sun never SETS"
Thus it was a hundred years ago.
Who would not like to be present at a
Thanksgiving feast a hundred years
now? The widest stretch of the
Imagination is not adequate to forecast
progress and the advancement that
will be made in that time. Even locally,
The men who sheer today at Santa Fe
New Mexico may be astonished,
,ould they visit the city again, to find at
hat time a magnificent city of 100, 900 to
100, 900 people at this very site; the ter
itory of New Mexico with a population
Ike that of the Empire state today. Big
tiles and towns, the hives of industry