se of one of the bloodiest and most brutal wars that even Spain
ever waged with her own colonists, the United States intervened, and
in a brief summer campaign destroyed the last vestiges of the mediaeval
Spanish domain in the tropic seas alike of the West and the remote
East.

We of this generation were but carrying to completion the work of our
fathers and of our fathers' fathers. It is moreover a matter for just
pride that while there was no falling off in the vigor and prowess
shown by our fighting men, there was a marked change for the better in
the spirit with which the deed was done. The backwoodsmen had pushed
the Spaniards from the Mississippi, had set up a slave-holding
republic in Texas, and had conquered the Californian gold-fields, in
the sheer masterful exercise of might. It is true that they won great
triumphs for civilization no less than for their own people; yet they
won them unwittingly, for they were merely doing as countless other
strong young races had done in the long contest carried on for so many
thousands of years between the fit and the unfit. But in 1898 the
United States, while having gained in strength, showed that there had
likewise been gain in justice, in mercy, in sense of responsibility.
Our conquest of the Southwest has been justified by the result. The
Latin peoples in the lands we won and settled have prospered like our
own stock. The sons and grandsons of those who had been our foes in
Louisiana and New Mexico came eagerly forward to serve in the army
that was to invade Cuba. Our people as a whole went into the war,
primarily, it is true, to drive out the Spaniard once for all from
America; but with the fixed determination to replace his rule by a
government of justice and orderly liberty.

To use the political terminology of the present day, the whole western
movement of our people was simply the most vital part of that great
movement of expansion which has been the central and all-important
feature of our history--a feature far more important than any other
since we became a nation, save only the preservation of the Union
itself. It was expansion which made us a great power; and at every
stage it has been bitterly antagonized, not only by the short-sighted
and the timid, but even by many who were neither one nor the other.
There were many men who opposed the movement west of the Alleghanies
and the peopling of the lands which now form Kentucky, Tennessee, and
the great States l