Quietly, without general interest, or even particular motive, the United States had accepted its share in handling many such world problems. As early as 1875 it had cooperated in founding and maintaining at Paris an International Bureau of Weights and Measures. In 1886 it joined in an international agreement for the protection of submarine cables; in 1890, in an agreement for the suppression of the African slave trade; in 1899, in an agreement for the regulation of the importation of spirituous liquors into Africa; in 1902, in a convention of American powers for the Arbitration of Pecuniary Claims. In 1903 it united with various American powers in an International Sanitary Convention; in 1905 it joined with most countries of the world in establishing and maintaining an International Institute of Agriculture at Rome. It would surprise most Americans to know that five hundred pages of their collection of "Treaties and Conventions" consist of such international undertakings, which amount in fact to a body of international legislation. It is obvious that the Government, in interpreting the injunction to avoid entangling alliances, has not found therein prohibition against international cooperation. In 1783 the United States had been a little nation with not sufficient inhabitants to fill up its million square miles of territory. Even in 1814 it still reached only to the Rockies and still found a troublesome neighbor lying between it and the Gulf of Mexico. Now with the dawn of the twentieth century it was a power of imperial dimensions, occupying three million square miles between the Atlantic and the Pacific, controlling the Caribbean, and stretching its possessions across the Pacific and up into the Arctic. Its influence was a potent factor in the development of Asia, and it was bound by the bonds of treaties, which it has ever regarded sacred, to assist in the regulation of many matters of world interest. Nor had the only change during the century been that visible in the United States. The world which seemed so vast and mysterious in 1812 had opened up most of its dark places to the valor of adventurous explorers, of whom the United States had contributed its fair share. The facilities of intercourse had conquered space, and along with its conquest had gone a penetration of the countries of the world by the tourist and the immigrant, the missionary and the trader, so that Terence's statement that nothing human was alien to him had become perforce true of the world.