an issue in the
Campaign of 1853. In 1854 the American ministers to London, France and
Madrid met at the direction of the State Department and drew up a
document (the "Ostend Manifesto") dealing with the future of Cuba.
McMaster summarizes the Manifesto in these words: "The United States
ought to buy Cuba because of its nearness to our coast; because it
belonged naturally to that great group of states of which the Union was
the providential nursery; because it commanded the mouth of the
Mississippi whose immense and annually growing trade must seek that way
to the ocean, and because the Union could never enjoy repose, could
never be secure, till Cuba was within its boundaries." (Vol. viii, pp.
185-6.) If Spain refused to sell Cuba it was suggested that the United
States should take it.

The Ostend Manifesto was rejected by the State Department, but it was a
good picture of the imperialistic sentiment at that time abroad among
certain elements in the United States.

The Cuban issue featured in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates in 1858. It was
hotly discussed by Congress in 1859. Only twenty years had passed since
the United States, by force of arms, had taken from Mexico territory
that she coveted. Now it was proposed to appropriate territory belonging
to Spain.

The outbreak of hostilities deferred the project, and when the Civil War
was over, the slave power was shattered. From that time forward national
policy was guided by the leaders of the new industrial North.

The process of this change was fearfully wasteful. The shifting of power
from the old regime to the new cost more lives and a greater expenditure
of wealth than all of the wars of conquest that had been fought during
the preceding half century.

The change was complete. The slaves were liberated by Presidential
Proclamation. The Southern form of civilization--patriarchal and
feudal--disappeared, and upon its ruins--rapidly in the West; slowly in
the South--there arose the new structure of an industrial civilization.

The new civilization had no need to look outward for economic advantage.
Forest tracts, mineral deposits and fertile land afforded ample
opportunity at home. It was three thousand miles to the Pacific and at
the end of the journey there was gold! The new civilization therefore
turned its energies to the problem of subduing the continent and of
establishing the machinery necessary to provide for its vastly
increasing needs. A small part of the