It is not to be denied that this transaction called into play new principles of international politics; nor can it be excused on the ground that new governments have been quickly recognized before. Never before had the United States declared a rebellion successful so long as the old government still stood, and the new one was able to hold out only by virtue of the interference of the United States itself. It is to be admitted that this was an imperialistic innovation, as was the subjugation of the Filipinos. But we should not be so narrow as to condemn a principle because it is new. All past history makes the expansion of American influence necessary; the same forces which make a state great continue to work through its later history. America must keep on in its extension, and if the methods by which the present nations grow are necessarily different from those by which the little Union was able to stretch out into uninhabited regions a hundred years ago, then, of course, the expansion of the twentieth century must take on other forms than it had in the nineteenth. But expansion itself cannot stop, nor can it be altered by mere citations from the Declaration of Independence, or pointings to the petty traditions of provincial days. The fight which the anti-imperialists are waging is thoroughly justified in so far as it is a fight against certain outgrowths of such expansion which have appeared in the Philippines, and most of all when it is against the loss to the Republic, through expansion, of its moral principles and of its finer and deeper feelings through the intoxication of power. But the fight is hopeless if it is waged against expansion itself. The course of the United States is marked out.
It requires no special gift of prophecy to point out that the next expansion will be toward the north. Just as the relations in Panama were fairly obvious a half year before the catastrophe came, the suspicion cannot be now put by that at a time not far hence the Stars and Stripes will wave in the northwestern part of Canada, and that there too the United States will be unwilling to lower its flag.
A newspaper is published in Boston which announces every day, at the top of the page, in bold type, that it is the first duty of the United States to annex Canada. On the other hand, one hears the opinion that nothing could be worse for the United States than to receive this immense, thinly populated territory even as a gift. There are the same differences of opinion on the other side of the boundary; some say that the Canadians are glad to be free from the problems which face the United States, from its municipal politics, its boss rule in political parties, and from the negro and Philippine questions, and that Canadian fidelity to the English Crown is not to be doubted for a moment. While others admit quite openly that to be annexed to the United States is the only natural thing that can happen to Canada. The immediate future will probably see some sort of compromise. It is wholly unlikely that the eastern part of Canada, in view of all its traditions, will prove untrue to its mother country; whereas the western part of Canada is under somewhat different economic conditions; it has so different a history, and is to-day so much more closely related to the United States than to England that the political separation will hardly continue very long. The thousands who have gone from the United States across the Canadian frontier in order to settle the unpeopled Northwest will, in the not distant future, give rise to some occasion in which economic and political logic will decree a transfer of the allegiance of Western Canada, with the exception of a narrow strip of land along the Pacific Coast. The area of the United States would then include a new region of about 250 million acres of wheat lands, of which to-day hardly two millions are in cultivation.