cient foreign service,
and to be an English citizen was to have a safeguard the whole world
round. Our young men were commended to their example; our legislators
were exhorted to study their practice and its results. Suddenly these
same teachers turn around. They warn us against the infection of
England's example. They tell us her colonial system is a failure; that
she would be stronger without her colonies than with them; that she is
eaten up with "militarism"; that to keep Cuba or the Philippines is
what a selfish, conquering, land-grabbing, aristocratic government like
England would do, and that her policy and methods are utterly
incompatible with our institutions. When a court thus reverses itself
without obvious reason (except a temporary partizan purpose), our
people are apt to put their trust in other tribunals.

[Sidenote: The Future.]

"I had thought," said Wendell Phillips, in his noted apology for
standing for the first time in his antislavery life under the flag of
his country, and welcoming the tread of Massachusetts men marshaled for
war--"I had thought Massachusetts wholly choked with cotton-dust and
cankered with gold." If Little Americans have thought so of their
country in these stirring days, and have fancied that initial reverses
would induce it to abandon its duty, its rights, and its great
permanent interests, they will live to see their mistake. They will
find it giving a deaf ear to these unworthy complaints of temporary
trouble or present loss, and turning gladly from all this incoherent
and resultless clamor to the new world opening around us. Already it
draws us out of ourselves. The provincial isolation is gone; and
provincial habits of thought will go. There is a larger interest in
what other lands have to show and teach; a larger confidence in our
own; a higher resolve that it shall do its whole duty to mankind, moral
as well as material, international as well as national, in such fashion
as becomes time's latest offspring and its greatest. We are grown more
nearly citizens of the world.

This new knowledge, these new duties and interests, must have two
effects--they must extend our power, influence, and trade, and they
must elevate the public service. Every returning soldier or traveler
tells the same story--that the very name "American" has taken a new
significance throughout the Orient. The shrewd Oriental no longer
regards us as a second- or third-class Power. He has just seen the on