The difference of conditions between the United States of to-day and of the beginning of this century illustrates aptly how necessary it is to avoid implicit acceptance of precedents, crystallized into maxims, and to seek for the quickening principle which justified, wholly or in part, the policy of one generation, but whose application may insure a very different course of action in a succeeding age. When the century opened, the United States was not only a continental power, as she now is, but she was one of several, of nearly equal strength as far as North America was concerned, with all of whom she had differences arising out of conflicting interests, and with whom, moreover, she was in direct geographical contact,--a condition which has been recognized usually as entailing peculiar proneness to political friction; for, while the interests of two nations may clash in quarters of the world remote from either, there is both greater frequency and greater bitterness when matters of dispute exist near at home, and especially along an artificial boundary, where the inhabitants of each are directly in contact with the causes of the irritation. It was therefore the natural and proper aim of the government of that day to abolish the sources of difficulty, by bringing all the territory in question under our own control, if it could be done by fair means. We consequently entered upon a course of action precisely such as a European continental state would have followed under like circumstances. In order to get possession of the territory in which our interests were involved, we bargained and manoeuvred and threatened; and although Jefferson's methods were peaceful enough, few will be inclined to claim that they were marked by excess of scrupulousness, or even of adherence to his own political convictions. From the highly moral standpoint, the acquisition of Louisiana under the actual conditions--being the purchase from a government which had no right to sell, in defiance of the remonstrance addressed to us by the power who had ceded the territory upon the express condition that it should not so be sold, but which was too weak to enforce its just reclamation against both Napoleon and ourselves--reduces itself pretty much to a choice between overreaching and violence, as the less repulsive means of compassing an end in itself both desirable and proper; nor does the attempt, by strained construction, to wrest West Florida into the bargain give a higher tone to the transaction. As a matter of policy, however, there is no doubt that our government was most wise; and the transfer, as well as the incorporation, of the territory was facilitated by the meagreness of the population that went with the soil. With all our love of freedom, it is not likely that many qualms were felt as to the political inclinations of the people concerning their transfer of allegiance. In questions of great import to nations or to the world, the wishes, or interests, or