The blandishments of England and Germany ought not to appeal to America. There is no nation that loves us unselfishly, or that would aid us unselfishly were we in need of help;[67] but if it shall one day come to the last bitter game among the nations, there will be none then so well equipped as we. We shall not need to call for aid. An English journal deems it “crude vulgarity” for the United States to think of wresting the maritime supremacy from Great Britain. It may be such, though we are not sure. It was perhaps crude vulgarity when we took America from Great Britain, when we took for ourselves a country so full of natural wealth, a country so perfect for the upbuilding of an aggressive and self-reliant national character. It might be crude vulgarity if we took this whole American continent as our own. Let us hope that this same character may still abide with us when we find need for the farther crude vulgarity of going abroad into the world. That we are meantime going abroad is without question true; not at the direction of our “leaders,” not by reason of our politics, but by reason of our transportation. The South, always the leader into the West, exclaims politically against the look toward Asia. It is but politics. The Tennessee troops fought well in the Philippines. Not all the world can stop us from thus going abroad. Whether we shall come home again at a later date remains yet to be seen. Whether we shall then have left a home worth the name remains yet to be proved. Such are some of the localities and situations into which our trails have nationally led us; such some of the problems into which our vaunted Age of Transportation is carrying us. There are new equations, new questions, new problems constantly confronting us with an ever growing urgency. It is not in any wise certain that a dispassionate study of this nature can leave us with a national vanity wholly untouched. It is not altogether sure that the conclusions framed upon our chosen premises, inevitable as they are, can leave the student wholly convinced of either our universal success or our universal happiness. Yet we shall do best to dismiss forebodings, and to cling, as still we may, to the faith and hope that was part of the American birthright. Indeed, we find it difficult to study even our grim columns of figures, our unimaginative records of events, without still retaining the curious and awesome feeling that heretofore the settlement of the American West, the birth and growth of the American man, has been a matter of fate, of destiny. There seemed to be a mighty west-bound tide of humanity of which we were but spectators, if indeed we were not part of the tide’s burden of hurried flotsam, carried forward without plan or aim or purpose.