It was the United States which first ventured to send a fleet to the Mediterranean to suppress the Barbary pirates--an act from which all the civilized world benefited. Indeed, it is within the limits of truth to say that the period of our liveliest intercourse with foreign powers was the identical period of "the fathers" who are so often and so falsely quoted as urging the policy of isolation that would sooner or later reduce us to the condition of the Chinese Empire. Our interests in the far East began as early as 1785, when the ship _Empress of New York_ came home from her first Chinese voyage to enrich her owners with the traffic in furs and ginseng. It is a fact too soon forgotten that our title to Oregon was founded upon the early establishment on that remote coast of a trading-post for our Chinese trade. As long ago as 1851, the native rulers of Hawaii begged--nay, even insisted--that our government annex those islands, whose people had already been familiar with our flag for years. Annexation did not take place until nearly half a century later, but the episode suffices to prove that even at that early day we were a world power in all that the term implies. Three years later--in 1854--Oliver Hazard Perry, Commodore of the United States navy, battered down the gates of Nagasaki, and by the method which England so successfully employed toward China, established "treaty relations" between the Yankees of the East and of the West. This brings us, after a view necessarily imperfect and cursory, very nearly to the War of the Rebellion. That struggle, and the absorbing internal questions which led up to it, kept us very busy at home, though both the North and the South, appreciating the importance of foreign sympathy and moral support, kept their emissaries constantly at the various courts of Europe. The international episodes of the war may be said in one sense to afford the most interesting chapters in its history. Certainly they should suffice to convince us that, even in the heat of that internal struggle, our affairs formed a part of the business of the outside world; so complete is the interdependence of nations. Nor need it be recalled that the war was scarcely at an end before Mr. Seward had occasion to warn Napoleon III. out of Mexico, and thus topple over a scheme of aggression involving at least two of the great powers of Europe. * * * * * It has been necessary to pass over with greater haste than I could have wished these arguments of the anti-expansionists, because there are other phases of the question which, to my mind at least, are of vastly greater importance; for I do not deny that there are obstacles in the path of territorial expansion.