constructing lighthouses, for removing bars and shoals, and making safe the ways of ocean commerce. The extension of this paternalistic principle to internal commerce would come in time with the movement of the people inland. [Illustration: WESTERN ARKS AT NEW ORLEANS. From Hall's "Etchings in America." In the foreground appear the flat boats which have brought down the produce of the western people and beyond the shipping, which is to carry the stuff to foreign markets. The sketch furnishes an Illustration of the compulsion which caused the purchase of New Orleans.] It may be said truthfully that these various measures, so inconsistent with the early avowed principles of the party, were inherited from the Federalists. But responsibility for the supreme act, the addition of foreign territory to the national domain, must be assumed solely by the Administration. Perhaps no action, until the decision to prevent certain States from leaving the Union, contributed so much to the central authority as the purchase of the Louisiana country by the Jeffersonians. If the decision had been negative, if conscientious scruples had been allowed to prevail, one hesitates to predict what would have been the fate of this "pent-up Utica." For forty years the ownership of Louisiana had been shifting and uncertain. For twenty years its possession had been a matter of scheming and intrigue by both Great Britain and France. Permanently in the hand of any foreign power, it would have completely blocked the path of progress. To possess one-half the drainage basin of the valley would have led to constant conflict with the owners of the other half. The insularity upon which the United States has depended so largely, the freedom from annoying neighbours, room for the westward expansion of the people, the unification of the Mississippi valley--all would have been lost if the original strict-construction theory had prevailed. Securing a domain extending to the Mississippi in the Peace of 1783 had been simply retaining what had been won largely by the colonists twenty years before when the French were driven from the valley. In the Louisiana question, the nation faced for the first time a national expansion.