It took more than the Philippine question, more than the Spanish war, to inaugurate the policy of “expansion”. These merely furnished the occasion for that toward which the progress of the world was leading us. To put it in a word—we have expanded because our “splendid isolation” is gone, rather than that our isolation is gone because we have expanded; and our isolation is gone because of the progress of the world. The great international factors of to-day, bringing the nations into common markets and common councils, pouring the commerce, news, literature, customs, life, of each into all the others, are the steamship and the cable. These have done more for America, probably, than for any other nation; for more than any other agency they have destroyed her isolation. But they have done even more than that; for they have made her virtually central. It was customary a few years ago—is yet in some quarters—to speak of the Pacific Ocean as if it were the backyard of the globe. It was imagined by one devout geographer that the hand of an all-wise Providence could be seen in arranging it so that the most civilized countries of the earth front upon the same ocean—the Atlantic. But the improvement of the steamship is equivalent to the reduction of distance, and this added to the establishment of bases of traffic virtually narrows the Pacific down to a smaller ocean than the Atlantic used to be. Thus America, between the great manufacturing centers of Europe and the greatest of markets in Asia, with the best of pathways to each, seems destined to become the central market of the world; and with the Nicaragua canal severing the Isthmus and the cable crossing the Pacific her position will be made all the more central as well as defensible. As a mere matter of policy, why should we not adopt expansion? Who ever knew a recluse of a nation to attain to national greatness of any kind, or to send forth leaders of men? In such a nation one inevitable result must be the provincializing and sectionalizing of men and measures, until breadth of statesmanship and catholicity of sympathy are unknown. Americans may well profit by contrasting the statesmanship of her consuls and diplomats abroad with that of certain leaders at home. The former, accustomed to view the national policy from without are practically unanimous so far as they have expressed themselves in urging that we come out of our seclusion. “Happily”, says one, “such an ideal is as impossible as it is ignoble and retrograde. Impelled by irresistible forces we are already beginning to look outward, and are preparing to take the high place among the nations to which our strength entitles us. We should be unworthy members of the stout-hearted race to which we belong if we were daunted by the dangers and burdens of the wider activities upon which we are entering”.