You and I can fold our hands and truly say we have done a
man's share, and leave the consequences to younger men who
must buffet with the next storms; but a Government which
ignores the great truths illuminated in heraldic language
over its very Capitol is not yet at the end of its woes.

With profound respect,
W.T. SHERMAN.

THE RELATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES TO THEIR NEW DEPENDENCIES

THE RELATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES TO THEIR NEW DEPENDENCIES

In modern times there have been two principal colonizing nations,
which not merely have occupied and administered a great transmarine
domain, but have impressed upon it their own identity--the totality of
their political and racial characteristics--to a degree that is likely
to affect permanently the history of the world at large.

These two nations, it is needless to say, are Great Britain and Spain.
Russia, their one competitor, differs from them in that her sustained
advance over alien regions is as wholly by land as theirs has been by
sea. France and Holland have occupied and administered, and continue
to occupy and administer, large extents of territory; but it is
scarcely necessary to argue that in neither case has the race
possessed the land, nor have the national characteristics been
transmitted to the dwellers therein as a whole. They have realized,
rather, the idea recently formulated by Mr. Benjamin Kidd for the
development of tropical regions,--administration from without.

The unexpected appearance of the United States as in legal control of
transmarine territory, which as yet they have not had opportunity
either to occupy or to administer, coincides in time with the final
downfall of Spain's colonial empire, and with a stage in the upward
progress of that of Great Britain, so marked, in the contrast it
presents to the ruin of Spain, as to compel attention and comparison,
with an ultimate purpose to draw therefrom instruction for the United
States in the new career forced upon them. The larger colonies of
Great Britain are not indeed reaching their majority, for that they
did long ago; but the idea formulated in the phrase "imperial
federation" shows that they, and the mother country herself, have
passed through and left behind the epoch when the accepted thought in
both was that they should in the end separate, as sons leave the
father's roof, to