e to the transaction. As a
matter of policy, however, there is no doubt that our government was
most wise; and the transfer, as well as the incorporation, of the
territory was facilitated by the meagreness of the population that
went with the soil. With all our love of freedom, it is not likely
that many qualms were felt as to the political inclinations of the
people concerning their transfer of allegiance. In questions of great
import to nations or to the world, the wishes, or interests, or
technical rights, of minorities must yield, and there is not
necessarily any more injustice in this than in their yielding to a
majority at the polls.

While the need of continental expansion pressed thus heavily upon the
statesmen of Jefferson's era, questions relating to more distant
interests were very properly postponed. At the time that matters of
such immediate importance were pending, to enter willingly upon the
consideration of subjects our concern in which was more remote, either
in time or place, would have entailed a dissemination of attention and
of power that is as greatly to be deprecated in statesmanship as it is
in the operations of war. Still, while the government of the day would
gladly have avoided such complications, it found, as have the
statesmen of all times, that if external interests exist, whatsoever
their character, they cannot be ignored, nor can the measures which
prudence dictates for their protection be neglected with safety.
Without political ambitions outside the continent, the commercial
enterprise of the people brought our interests into violent antagonism
with clear, unmistakable, and vital interests of foreign belligerent
states; for we shall sorely misread the lessons of 1812, and of the
events which led to it, if we fail to see that the questions in
dispute involved issues more immediately vital to Great Britain, in
her then desperate struggle, than they were to ourselves, and that the
great majority of her statesmen and people, of both parties, so
regarded them. The attempt of our government to temporize with the
difficulty, to overcome violence by means of peaceable coercion,
instead of meeting it by the creation of a naval force so strong as to
be a factor of consideration in the international situation, led us
into an avoidable war.

The conditions which now constitute the political situation of the
United States, relatively to the world at large, are fundamentally
different from those t