ons between the United States of to-day and
of the beginning of this century illustrates aptly how necessary it is
to avoid implicit acceptance of precedents, crystallized into maxims,
and to seek for the quickening principle which justified, wholly or in
part, the policy of one generation, but whose application may insure a
very different course of action in a succeeding age. When the century
opened, the United States was not only a continental power, as she now
is, but she was one of several, of nearly equal strength as far as
North America was concerned, with all of whom she had differences
arising out of conflicting interests, and with whom, moreover, she was
in direct geographical contact,--a condition which has been recognized
usually as entailing peculiar proneness to political friction; for,
while the interests of two nations may clash in quarters of the world
remote from either, there is both greater frequency and greater
bitterness when matters of dispute exist near at home, and especially
along an artificial boundary, where the inhabitants of each are
directly in contact with the causes of the irritation. It was
therefore the natural and proper aim of the government of that day to
abolish the sources of difficulty, by bringing all the territory in
question under our own control, if it could be done by fair means. We
consequently entered upon a course of action precisely such as a
European continental state would have followed under like
circumstances. In order to get possession of the territory in which
our interests were involved, we bargained and manoeuvred and
threatened; and although Jefferson's methods were peaceful enough, few
will be inclined to claim that they were marked by excess of
scrupulousness, or even of adherence to his own political convictions.
From the highly moral standpoint, the acquisition of Louisiana under
the actual conditions--being the purchase from a government which had
no right to sell, in defiance of the remonstrance addressed to us by
the power who had ceded the territory upon the express condition that
it should not so be sold, but which was too weak to enforce its just
reclamation against both Napoleon and ourselves--reduces itself pretty
much to a choice between overreaching and violence, as the less
repulsive means of compassing an end in itself both desirable and
proper; nor does the attempt, by strained construction, to wrest West
Florida into the bargain give a higher ton