her their whole conception of national
mission and national life, especially their legislation,[325] for which
he anticipated larger and more Catholic aims than obtain in Europe,
hampered as it is by countless political and linguistic boundaries and
barred thereby from any far-reaching unity of purpose and action.

Canada, British South Africa, Australia and the United States, though
widely separated, have in common a certain wide outlook upon life, a
continental element in the national mind, bred in their people by their
generous territories. The American recognizes his kinship of mind with
these colonial Englishmen as something over and above mere kinship of
race. It consists in their deep-seated common democracy, the democracy
born in men who till fields and clear forests, not as plowmen and
wood-cutters, but as makers of nations. It consists in identical
interests and points of view in regard to identical problems growing out
of the occupation and development of new and almost boundless
territories. Race questions, paucity of labor, highways and railroads,
immigration, combinations of capital, excessive land holdings, and
illegal appropriation of land on a large scale, are problems that meet
them all. The monopolistic policy of the United States in regard to
American soil as embodied in the Monroe Doctrine, and the expectation
lurking in the mental background of every American that his country may
eventually embrace the northern continent, find their echo in
Australia's plans for wider empire in the Pacific. The Commonwealth of
Australia has succeeded in getting into its own hands the administration
of British New Guinea (90,500 square miles.) It has also secured from
the imperial government the unusual privilege of settling the relations
between itself and the islands of the Pacific, because it regards the
Pacific question as the one question of foreign policy in which its
interests are profoundly involved. In the same way the British in South
Africa, sparsely scattered though they are, feel an imperative need of
further expansion, if their far-reaching schemes of commerce and empire
are to be realized.

[Sidenote: Colonials as road builders.]

The effort to annihilate space by improved means of communication has
absorbed the best intellects and energies of expanding peoples. The
ancient Roman, like the Incas of Peru, built highways over every part of
the empire, undaunted by natural obstacles like the Alps and A