with all its advantages on the one hand, and all its burdens on the other. It is not enough for it te vaunt its greatness and superiority, and call upon the rest of the world to admire and be duly impressed. Posing before less favored peoples as an exemplar of the superiority of American institutions may be justified and may have its uses; but posing alone is like answering the appeal of a mendicant by bidding him admire your own sleekness, your own fine clothes and handsome house, and your generally comfortable and prosperous condition. He possibly should do that and be grateful for the spectacle, but what he really asks and needs is a helping hand. The mission of this country, if it has one, and I verily believe it has, is not merely to pose, but to act—and, while always governing itself by prudence and common sense and making its own special interests the first and paramount objects of its care, to forego no fitting opportunity to further the progress of civilization practically as well as theoretically by timely deeds as well as by eloquent words. There is such a thing for a nation as a 'splendid isolation'—as when, for a worthy cause, for its own independence, or dignity, or vital interests, it unshrinkingly opposes itself to a hostile world. But isolation that is nothing but the shirking of the responsibility of high place and great power is simply ignominious."

"The doors to that 'shining destiny' are open wide," says a late writer in the San Francisco Chronicle. "Shall the Nation pass them or shall it shrink back into itself and leave to other and braver hands the prizes of the future. To broaden out in the field of enterprise and acquisition is the duty of the Republic, to strengthen itself whenever it safely can, to do its part in redeeming the victims of ignorance as well as of cruelty, to gather to itself the riches that will free it from debt, and make its influence paramount in the world's affairs as the greatest part of the Anglo-Saxon brotherhood; to plant itself in the midst of events, and mold them to its mighty purpose."

Such is the dream of American imperialism. Its prizes lie in our hands unasked. The fates have forced them upon us. But before we seize them, now let us ask what it will cost? First, it will cost life and money in rich measure. Kipling tells us the cost of British Admiralty:

We have fed our sea for a thousand years,
And she calls us still unfed,

Though there's never a wave of all her waves

But marks our English dead.

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.

There's never a flood goes shoreward now
But lifts a keel we have manned;
There's never an ebb goes seaward now
But drops our dead on the sand;

But slinks our dead on the strand forlore

From the Ducies to the Swin;
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God! we have paid it in.

We must feed our sea for a thousand years

For that is our doom and pride,

As it was when they sailed with the golden Hind,

Or the wreck that struck last tide;

Or the wreck that lies on the spouting reef,

When the ghastly blue lights flare:
If blood be the price of admiralty,
My God, we have paid it fair.

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 them. 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 notion that America is big enough to maintain a separate basis of coinage, a freeman's scale of wages, a peculiar repúblican 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 embassadors 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 effective 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-sufficienecy or isolation for isolation's sake. To shirk 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, open-eyed, 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.