And again the American will say: "That's all right; I am not talking of Europe. You've been fighting all over the world all the time. There has never been a year when you have not been licking some little tin-pot king and freezing on to his possessions." Americans are rather proud--justly proud--of the way in which their power has spread from within the narrow limits of the original thirteen States till it has dominated half a continent. It has, indeed, been a splendid piece of work. But what the American is loth to acknowledge is that that growth was as truly a colonising movement--a process of imperial expansion--as has been the growth of the British Empire. Of late years, American historical writers have been preaching this fact; but the American people has not grasped it. Moreover there were tin-pot kings already ruling America. Sioux, Nez Perce, or Cree--Zulu, Ashanti, or Burmese: the names do not matter. And when the expansive energy of the American people reached the oceans, it could no more stop than it could stop at the Mississippi. Hawaii, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico were as inevitable as Louisiana and Texas. And the acquisition of the two last-named was precisely as imperial a process as the acquisition of the others. It is only the leap over-seas that, quite illogically, gives the latter, to American eyes, a different seeming. It matters not whether you vault a boundary pillar on the plain, a river, a mountain barrier, or seven thousand miles of sea-water. The process is the same. Nor in any of the cases was the forward movement other than commendable and inevitable. It was the necessary manifestation of the unrestrainable centrifugal impulse of the Anglo-Saxon. The impulse which sent the first English colonists to North America sent them also to Australia, to India and the uttermost parts of the earth. The same impulse drove the American colonists westward, northward, southward, in whatever direction they met no restraining force equal to their own expansive energy. It drove them to the Pacific, to the Rio Grande, to the Sault Ste. Marie; and it has driven them over oceans into the Arctic Circle, to the shores of Asia, down the Caribbean. And as it drove them it drove also those Englishmen who were left at home and they too spread on all lines of least resistance. But no American (I have never met one, though I must have talked on the subject to hundreds) will agree that the dispersal of the Englishmen left at home was as legitimate, as necessary, and every whit as peaceful as the dispersal of those Englishmen who went first and made their new home in America.