es the one hundred and seventeenth.

BENJAMIN HARRISON.

~~~~~ By the President.
{L. S.}
~~~~~ JOHN W. FOSTER, _Secretary of State_.

THE ADMIRATION OF A CAREFUL CRITIC.

HENRY HARRISSE, a celebrated Columbian critic, in his erudite and
valuable work, "Columbus and the Bank of St. George."

Nor must you believe that I am inclined to lessen the merits of the
great Genoese or fail to admire him. But my admiration is the result of
reflection, and not a blind hero-worship. Columbus removed out of the
range of mere speculation the idea that beyond the Atlantic Ocean lands
existed and could be reached by sea, made of the notion a fixed fact,
and linked forever the two worlds. That event, which is unquestionably
the greatest of modern times, secures to Columbus a place in the
pantheon dedicated to the worthies whose courageous deeds mankind will
always admire.

[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF COLUMBUS, BY SIR ANTONIO MORO.

Used by Washington Irving to illustrate his "Life of Columbus." From the
original in the possession of Mr. C. F. Gunther of Chicago. (See pages
52 and 113.)]

But our gratitude must not carry us beyond the limits of an equitable
appreciation. Indiscriminate praise works mischief and injustice. When
tender souls represent Columbus as being constantly the laughing-stock
of all, and leading a life of misery and abandonment in Spain, they do
injustice to Deza, to Cabrera, to Quintanilla, to Mendoza, to Beatrice
de Bobadilla, to Medina-Celi, to Ferdinand and Isabella, and probably a
host of others who upheld him as much as they could from the start. When
blind admirers imagine that the belief in the existence of transatlantic
countries rushed out of Columbus' cogitations, complete, unaided, and
alone, just as Minerva sprang in full armor from the head of Jupiter,
they disregard the efforts of numerous thinkers who, from Aristotle and
Roger Bacon to Toscanelli, evolved and matured the thought, until
Columbus came to realize it. When dramatists, poets, and romancers
expatiate upon the supposed spontaneous or independent character of the
discovery of America, and ascribe the achievement exclusively to the
genius of a single man, they adopt a theory which is discouraging and
untrue.

No man is, or ever was, ahead of his times. No human efforts are, or
ever were, disconnected from a long chain of previous exertions; and
this applies to all