The Man Without a Country | Page 2

affairs of this world. Jesus
Christ at the end of his life prayed to God that all men might become
One, "As thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be
one in us."

The history of the world for eighteen hundred and seventy years since
he spoke has shown the steady fulfilment of the hope expressed in this
prayer.
Men are nearer unity--they are nearer to being one--than they were
then.
Thus, at that moment each tribe in unknown America was at war with
each other tribe. At this moment there is not one hostile weapon used
by one American against another, from Cape Bathurst at the north to
the southern point of Patagonia.
At that moment Asia, Africa, and Europe were scenes of similar
discord. Europe herself knows so little of herself that no man would
pretend to say which Longbeards were cutting the throats of other
Longbeards, or which Scots were lying in ambush for which Britons, in
any year of the first century of our era.
Call it the "Philosophy of History," or call it the "Providence of God,"
it is certain that the unity of the race of man has asserted itself as the
Saviour of mankind said it should.
In this growing unity of mankind it has come about that the Sultan of
Turkey cannot permit the massacre of Armenian Christians without
answering for such permission before the world.
It has come about that no viceroy, serving a woman, who is the
guardian of a boy, can be permitted to starve at his pleasure two
hundred thousand of God's children. The world is so closely
united--that is to say, unity is so real--that when such a viceroy does
undertake to commit such an iniquity, somebody shall hold his hands.
The story of Philip Nolan was published in such a crisis that it met the
public eye and interest. It met the taste of the patriotic public at the
moment. It was copied everywhere without the slightest deference to
copyright. It was, by the way, printed much more extensively in
England than it was in America. Immediately there began to appear a
series of speculations based on what you would have said was an

unimportant error of mine. My hero is a purely imaginary character.
The critics are right in saying that not only there never was such a man,
but there never could have been such a man. But he had to have a name.
And the choice of a name in a novel is a matter of essential importance,
as it proved to be here.
Now I had a hero who was a young man in 1807. He knew nothing at
that time but the valley of the Mississippi River. "He had been educated
on a plantation where the finest company was a Spanish officer, or a
French merchant from Orleans." He must therefore have a name
familiar to Western people at that time. Well, I remembered that in the
preposterous memoirs of General James Wilkinson's, whenever he had
a worse scrape than usual to explain, he would say that the papers were
lost when Mr. Nolan was imprisoned or was killed in Texas. This Mr.
Nolan, as Wilkinson generally calls him, had been engaged with
Wilkinson in some speculations mostly relating to horses.
Remembering this, I took the name Nolan for my hero. I made my man
the real man's brother. "He had spent half his youth with an older
brother, hunting horses in Texas." And again:--"he was catching wild
horses in Texas with his adventurous cousin." [Note: Young authors
may observe that he is called a brother in one place and a cousin in
another, because such slips would take place in a real narrative.
Proofreaders do not like them, but they give a plausibility to the story.]
I had the impression that Wilkinson's partner was named Stephen, and
as Philip and Stephen were both evangelists in the Bible, I named my
man Philip Nolan, on the supposition that the mother who named one
son Stephen would name another Philip. It was not for a year after, that,
in looking at Wilkinson's "Memoirs" again, I found to my amazement,
not to say my dismay, that Wilkinson's partner was named Philip Nolan.
We had, therefore, two Philip Nolans, one a real historical character,
who was murdered by the Spaniards on the 21st of March, 1801, at
Waco in Texas; the other a purely imaginary character invented by
myself, who appears for the first time on the 23d of September, 1807,
at a court-martial at Fort Adams.
I supposed nobody but myself in New England had ever heard of Philip
Nolan. But in the Southwest, in Texas and Louisiana, it was but

sixty-two years since the Spaniards murdered him. In truth,