usy of influence over native occupants of the soil,
fear of encroachment, unperceived till too late, and so a constant, if
silent, strife to insure national preponderance in these newly opened
regions. The colonial expansion of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries is being resumed under our eyes, bringing with it the same
train of ambitions and feelings that were exhibited then, though these
are qualified by the more orderly methods of modern days and by a
well-defined mutual apprehension,--the result of a universal
preparedness for war, the distinctive feature of our own time which
most guarantees peace.

All this reacts evidently upon Europe, the common mother-country of
these various foreign enterprises, in whose seas and lands must be
fought out any struggle springing from these remote causes, and upon
whose inhabitants chiefly must fall both the expense and the bloodshed
thence arising. To these distant burdens of disquietude--in the
assuming of which, though to an extent self-imposed, the present
writer recognizes the prevision of civilization, instinctive rather
than conscious, against the perils of the future--is to be added the
proximate and unavoidable anxiety dependent upon the conditions of
Turkey and its provinces, the logical outcome of centuries of Turkish
misrule. Deplorable as have been, and to some extent still are,
political conditions on the American continents, the New World, in the
matter of political distribution of territory and fixity of tenure, is
permanence itself, as compared with the stormy prospect confronting
the Old in its questions which will not down.

In these controversies, which range themselves under the broad heads
of colonial expansion and the Eastern question, all the larger powers
of Europe, the powers that maintain considerable armies or navies, or
both, are directly and deeply interested--except Spain. The latter
manifests no solicitude concerning the settlement of affairs in the
east of Europe, nor is she engaged in increasing her still
considerable colonial dominion. This preoccupation of the great
powers, being not factitious, but necessary,--a thing that cannot be
dismissed by an effort of the national will, because its existence
depends upon the nature of things,--is a legitimate element in the
military calculations of the United States. It cannot enter into her
diplomatic considerations, for it is her pride not to seek, from the
embarrassments of other states, adva