ty disregard of principle, any wrong heretofore silently,
perhaps sadly, ignored, each unobserved or disregarded innovation of
the past, is magnified into a precedent justifying anything and
everything in the future. If we formerly on some occasion swallowed a
gnat, why now, is it asked, strain at a camel? Truths once accepted as
"self-evident," since become awkward of acceptance, were ever thus
pettifogged out of the path, and fundamental principles have in this way
prescriptively been tampered with. It is now nearly a century and a
quarter ago, when Great Britain was contemplating the subjection of her
American dependencies, that Edmund Burke denounced "tampering" with the
"ingenuous and noble roughness of truly constitutional materials," as
"the odious vice of restless and unstable minds." Historically speaking
it is not unfair to ask if this is less so in the United States in 1898
than it was in Great Britain in 1775.

What is now proposed, therefore, examined in connection with our
principles and traditional policy as a nation, does apparently indicate
a break in continuity,--historically, it will probably constitute what
is known in geology as a "fault." Indeed, it is almost safe to say that
history hardly records any change of base and system on the part of a
great people at once so sudden, so radical, and so pregnant with
consequences. To the optimist,--he who has no dislike to "Old Jewry," as
the proper receptacle for worn-out garments, personal or political,--the
outlook is inspiring. He insensibly recalls and repeats those fine lines
of Tennyson:

"To-day I saw the dragon-fly
Come from the wells where he did lie.

"An inner impulse rent the veil
Of his old husk: from head to tail
Came out clear plates of sapphire mail.

"He dried his wings: like gauze they grew:
Thro' crofts and pastures wet with dew
A living flash of light he flew."

To others, older perhaps, but at any rate more deeply impressed with the
difference apt to develop between dreams and actualities, the situation
calls to mind a comparison, more historical it is true, but less
inspiriting so far as a commitment to the new policy is concerned. At
the risk, possibly, of offending some of those present, I will venture
to institute it. In the fourth chapter of the Gospel according to St.
Matthew, I find this incident recorded: "The devil taketh him [the
Saviour] up into an exceeding high mountain, and show