ts Spain might have incurred in the past for
expenditures in that archipelago for the benefit of the people.

They protected what was gained in the war from adroit efforts to put it
all at risk again, through an untimely appeal to the noble principle of
Arbitration. They held--and I am sure the best friends of the principle
will thank them for holding--that an honest resort to Arbitration must
come before war, to avert its horrors, not after war, to escape its
consequences.

They were enabled to pledge the most Protectionist country in the world
to the liberal and wise policy of the Open Door in the East.

And finally they secured that diplomatic novelty, a treaty in which the
acutest senatorial critics have not found a peg on which inadmissible
claims against the country may be hung.

[Sidenote: The Material Side of the Business.]

At the same time they neither neglected nor feared the duty of caring
for the material interests of their own country;--the duty of grasping
the enormous possibilities upon which we had stumbled, for sharing in
the awakening and development of the farther East. That way lies now
the best hope of American commerce. There you may command a natural
rather than an artificial trade--a trade which pushes itself instead of
needing to be pushed; a trade with people who can send you things you
want and cannot produce, and take from you in return things they want
and cannot produce; in other words, a trade largely between different
zones, and largely with less advanced peoples, comprising nearly one
fourth the population of the globe, whose wants promise to be speedily
and enormously developed.

The Atlantic Ocean carries mainly a different trade, with people as
advanced as ourselves, who could produce or procure elsewhere much of
what they buy from us, while we could produce, if driven to it, most of
what we need to buy from them. It is more or less, therefore, an
artificial trade, as well as a trade in which we have lost the first
place and will find it difficult to regain. The ocean carriage for the
Atlantic is in the hands of our rivals.

The Pacific Ocean, on the contrary, is in our hands now. Practically we
own more than half the coast on this side, dominate the rest, and have
midway stations in the Sandwich and Aleutian Islands. To extend now the
authority of the United States over the great Philippine Archipelago is
to fence in the China Sea and secure an almost equally commanding
posi