d when the expansive energy of
the American people reached the oceans, it could no more stop than it
could stop at the Mississippi. Hawaii, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico
were as inevitable as Louisiana and Texas. And the acquisition of the
two last-named was precisely as imperial a process as the acquisition
of the others. It is only the leap over-seas that, quite illogically,
gives the latter, to American eyes, a different seeming. It matters not
whether you vault a boundary pillar on the plain, a river, a mountain
barrier, or seven thousand miles of sea-water. The process is the same.
Nor in any of the cases was the forward movement other than commendable
and inevitable. It was the necessary manifestation of the unrestrainable
centrifugal impulse of the Anglo-Saxon.

The impulse which sent the first English colonists to North America sent
them also to Australia, to India and the uttermost parts of the earth.
The same impulse drove the American colonists westward, northward,
southward, in whatever direction they met no restraining force equal to
their own expansive energy. It drove them to the Pacific, to the Rio
Grande, to the Sault Ste. Marie; and it has driven them over oceans into
the Arctic Circle, to the shores of Asia, down the Caribbean. And as it
drove them it drove also those Englishmen who were left at home and they
too spread on all lines of least resistance. But no American (I have
never met one, though I must have talked on the subject to hundreds)
will agree that the dispersal of the Englishmen left at home was as
legitimate, as necessary, and every whit as peaceful as the dispersal of
those Englishmen who went first and made their new home in America.

With the acquisition of over-sea dominions of their own, many Americans
are coming to comprehend something of the powerlessness of a great
people in the grip of its destiny. They are also beginning to understand
that the ruling and civilising of savage and alien peoples is not
either all comfort or all profit. If Americans were given the option
to-day to take more Philippines, would they take them? Great Britain has
been familiar with _her_ Philippines for half a century and more. Does
America suppose that she also did not learn her lesson? Will not
Americans understand with what utter reluctance she has been compelled
again and again to take more? Some day Americans will come to believe
that England no more desired to annex Burmah than the United Stat