We've strewed our best to the weeds' unrest,

To the shark and the sheering gull;

If blood be the price of admiralty

Lord God! we have paid it in full.”

If we have a navy that can make history we must pay for it as England does, not only in blood but in cold, hard cash. This means more taxes, heavy taxes, more expenditures, more waste. It means the revision of our tax laws, a tariff for revenue only with every element of protection for American industries squeezed out of it. The government will need all it can get. We must manage our colonies that they may yield revenue. We must cherish commerce as we have tried to cherish manufacture, and we must cherish manufacture and

agriculture through commerce. Much more of a navy we need to preserve ourselves from imbecility. One victory like that of Manila may save us from a dozen insults, and we must have the means to win such victories.

So far this would not be unmixed evil, perhaps no evil at all. But we must go farther. Imperialism demands the maintenance of a standing army large enough to carry out whatever we undertake. We must wholly change our pension laws and deal with the veteran on a basis of business, not of sentiment. Imperialism leaves no place for sentiment in public affairs. To maintain. strong armies the nations of continental Europe sacrifice everything else. The people are loaded with armor till they cannot rise, and they dare not throw it off. Even to-day Italy is on the verge of a revolution, and the cause is the cost of the army. The Italian proverb says that if one throws a stone from a window it will hit a soldier or a priest, and the farmer pays for both.

The whole world must become the range of our interest. We must make every American's house his castle from Kamchatka to Kerguelen. We must be quick to revenge and strong to bluff. We must never fight when the issue is doubtful, and never fail to fight if there is a point to be gained. We must give up our foolish notions that America is big enough to maintain a separate basis of coinage, a freeman's scale of wages, a peculiar republican social order different from that of the rest of mankind. We must open our own doors as we would push open the doors of the world. We must change the character of our diplomacy. We must make statecraft a profession. Hitherto we have sent out our ambassadors because to do so is the fashion among nations, not because we have anything for them to do. Hereafter they must go out to spread American influences. The plain, blunt, effective truth-telling of our present diplomacy must give way to the power to carry our point. We must not send men to foreign countries because we do not want them at home. The dull incompetence of our consular service must give way to a system of trained agents. And this, too, has its compensating reactions. As our foreign service is made. efffective it will become dignified. This will help our relations abroad because foreign nations judge us by the quality of our representatives.

Our government must be changed for our changing needs. We must give up the checks and balances in our constitution. It is said that our great battleship Oregon can turn about end for end within her own length. The dominant nation must have the same power. She must be capable of reversing her action in

a minute, of turning around within her own length. This " our prate of statute and of state" makes impossible. We shall receive many hard knocks before we reach this condition, but we must reach it if we are to "work mightily" in the affairs of the world. If we are to deal with crises in foreign affairs we must hold them with a steadier grasp than that with which we have held the Cuban question. We cannot move accurately and quickly under the joint leadership of a conservative and steady-headed President, a hysterical or venal Senate, and a House intent upon its own re-election. That kind of checks and balances we must lay aside forever. As matters are now, President, Senate and House check each other's movements and the State falls over its own feet.

The government of the United States is the expression of the transient will of the people, so hemmed in by checks and balances that positive action is difficult whatever the will of the majority for the moment may be. This is the government for peace and self-defense, but not for aggression. The government of England expresses the permanent will of the intelligent people with such checks as shut out ignorance and control incompetence. The nation and not the individual man is the unit in its actions.

Towards the English system we must approach more and more closely if we are to deal with foreign affairs in large fashion. The town-meeting idea must give way to centralization of power. We must look away from our own affairs, neglect them if you please, until the pressure of growing expenditure forces us to attend to them again, and to attend to them more carefully than we ever

yet have done. Good government at home must precede good government of dependencies. One reason England is governed well is that misgovernment anywhere on any large scale would be fatal to her credit and fatal to her power. She must call her best men to her political service, because without them she would perish.

It may be that the choice of imperialism is already made. If so, we shall learn the lesson of dominion in the hardest school of experience. That we shall ultimately learn it I have no doubt, for ours is a nation of apt scholars. We shall hold our own in war and diplomacy, we shall tie the hands of turbulent nations and seize the assets of bankrupt ones, and we shall teach the art of money-making to the dependent nations who shall be our wards and slaves.

Some great changes in our system are inevitable, and belong to the course of natural progress. Against them I have nothing to say. Whatever our part in the affairs of the world we should play it manfully. But with all this I believe that the movement toward broad dominion so eloquently outlined by Mr. Olney, would be a step downward. It would be to turn from our highest purposes to drift with the current of manifest destiny. It would be not to do the work of America, but to follow the ways of the rest of the world. I make no plea for indifference or self-sufficiency or isolation for isolation's sake. To shrink from world movements or to drift with the current is alike unworthy of our origin and destiny. Only this I urge; let our choice be made with open eyes, not at the dictates of chance disguised as "Manifest Destiny." Unforgetting, counting all the

cost, let us make our decision. Let ours be sober, fearless, prayerful choice. The federal republic—the imperial republic-which shall it be?

There are three main reasons for opposing every step toward imperialism. First, dominion is brute force; second, dependent nations are slave nations; third, the making of men is greater than the building of empires.

As to the first of these: The extension of dominion rests on the strength of arms. Men who cannot hold town meetings must obey through brute force. In Alaska, for example, our occupation is a farce and scandal. Only force can make it otherwise. Only by force can the masses of Hawaii or Cuba be held to industry and order. To furnish such power, we shall need a colonial bureau, with its force of extra-national police. A large army and navy must justify itself by doing something. Army and navy we must maintain for our own defense, but beyond that they can do little that does not hurt, and they must be used if they would be kept alive. Even warfare for humanity falls to the level of other wars, and all wars according to Benjamin Franklin, are bad, some worse than others. The rescue of the oppressed is only accomplished by the use of force against the oppressor. The lofty purposes of humanity are forgotten in the joy of struggle and the pride of conquest.

The other reasons concern the integrity of the Republic itself. This was the lesson of slavery, that no republic can "endure half slave and half free." The republics of antiquity fell because they were republics of the few only, for each citizen rested on the backs of nine slaves. A republic cannot be an oligarchy as well. The