January 2011

It is a well-recognized fact that a longdistance view is often better than one from up close. America today seethes with controversy over the war in Vietnam, and over her role as a world power. She has, in a sense, taken over from Great Britain many of the problems and responsibilities of the world. For that reason we think our readers may be interested in this excerpt from a friendly and resolute speech recently delivered by the Honorable Sir Howard Beale, K.B.E., Q.C., the former Ambassador of the Australian Commonwealth to the United States, before the Bar Association of the State of New York.

—The Editors

It started with a trickle and ended in a flood. The first to come were twenty-three Jews from Brazil who landed in New Amsterdam in 1654, in flight from a country no longer hospitable to them. They were, in origin, Spanish and Portuguese Jews (many with grandiloquent Iberian names) whose families had been wandering for a century and a half. New Amsterdam provided a chilly reception. Governor Peter Stuyvesant at first asked them to leave, but kinder hearts in the Dutch West India Company granted them the right to stay, “provided the poor among them … be supported by their own nation.” By the end of the century, there were perhaps one hundred Jews; by the middle of Hie eighteenth century, there were about three hundred in New York, and smaller communities in Newport, Philadelphia, and Charleston.

The spectacle will long be remembered as the I finest… in this region,” the reporter wrote. I “The lady was dressed in a jaunty suit of blue flannel trimmed with gold braid, her short skirts revealing neat-fitting gaiters. A nobby sailor’s hat of plaited straw crowned the whole and gave her face a boyish piquancy. She stepped lightly into the frail contrivance which serves Carlotta in lieu of a basket. This consists of a thin wooden platform suspended by hammock twine to the concentrating ring of the balloon, and as the Aerial gently arose, the entire proportions of her youthful figure could be plainly seen, apparently standing on the very air itself as she waved her hat in salute. The Aerial glided slowly northeastward rising to a height of about a mile, then it retraced its path, passing quietly directly over the public square, and drifting westward toward Lake Ontario.”

Only fifty years ago, the cutting of natural ice in America was big business, but today it has almost vanished. Gone are the huge icehouses, so cavernous that clouds formed inside them and rain fell. Gone are the itinerant ice cutters, and forgotten their skills; the simple tools of their trade, like those on the opposite page, have already become antique-shop items.

Until the 1800’s, Americans were content to cool their food and drink in their cellars or springhouses; an iced drink in summertime was a strange and wonderful experience to be enjoyed only in the big city. But by the late summer of 1850, James Fenimore Cooper was writing in his diary: “Ice at the table still. We Americans probably use more ice than most people …” The shipping industry was handling! more tons of ice than of any other commodity save cotton.