What then; are we about to abandon it? No, but we are about to abandon a perverted interpretation of it and that, too, not so much from choice as from necessity. We are beginning to see that a measure of prudence for a weak power is by no means equally wise when that power has grown strong. We are beginning to see, also, that a false interpretation of it has somehow become common, which would confine our activities, save in a commercial way, to our own boundaries. It somehow assumes that we are as large and influential now as we were ever intended to be; that our future development is to be altogether internal. To admit the truth of this—to admit that there is a limit to the area of our country beyond which it is imprudent to go, to admit that our country, being a republic, cannot consistently possess or successfully administer any foreign territory, whether detached points of military and commercial importance or portions of mainland—to admit all this is to admit the inability of our government to hold its own with the best. The “government” in England is no less democratic than the “administration” in America, and yet England leads the world in colonization. Expansion in its broadest sense is not new. It is as old, almost, as the government itself. We have merely come to the point of extending its application to other lands, as England has long been doing, and that, too, at a time when rapid transit and communication have simplified the task inconceivably. The policy of expansion was in the air in 1893—though it had not yet received a name—when the weight of public opinion demanded of our executive that the Hawaiian Islands should not be restored to an incompetent queen. Americans have not yet forgotten their chagrin, nor how European diplomats laughed at the spectacle of the “Great Republic”, wanting so much to do the thing it ought while imagining that its hands were tied by the stay-at-home tradition. This same timidity or reticence or reserve or self-distrust or self-satisfaction, call it by whichever term you choose, has already lost for us the Samoan Islands (save one), Hayti and other strategic points. There is some gratification to be sure in being able to show the world, as we have done, an example of a country which is not grasping for territory—which can even reject a point of advantage offered by the inhabitants thereof, feeling that the sacrifice of territory is better for us than the sacrifice of the principle of self-government for them. But in neither Samoa nor Hayti has the subsequent history of those places justified our rejection of them, either for their sake or our own. Moreover as far as its influence on the world is concerned it seems to have failed of its effect, if one may judge by the accusation of avarice that assailed us at the outbreak of the Spanish war.