There is some gratification to be sure in being able to show the world, as we have done, an example of a country which is not grasping for territory—which can even reject a point of advantage offered by the inhabitants thereof, feeling that the sacrifice of territory is better for us than the sacrifice of the principle of self-government for them. But in neither Samoa nor Hayti has the subsequent history of those places justified our rejection of them, either for their sake or our own. Moreover as far as its influence on the world is concerned it seems to have failed of its effect, if one may judge by the accusation of avarice that assailed us at the outbreak of the Spanish war.
It took more than the Philippine question, more than the Spanish war, to inaugurate the policy of “expansion”. These merely furnished the occasion for that toward which the progress of the world was leading us. To put it in a word—we have expanded because our “splendid isolation” is gone, rather than that our isolation is gone because we have expanded; and our isolation is gone because of the progress of the world.
The great international factors of to-day, bringing the nations into common markets and common councils, pouring the commerce, news, literature, customs, life, of each into all the others, are the steamship and the cable. These have done more for America, probably, than for any other nation; for more than any other agency they have destroyed her isolation. But they have done even more than that; for they have made her virtually central.
It was customary a few years ago—is yet in some quarters—to speak of the Pacific Ocean as if it were the backyard of the globe. It was imagined by one devout geographer that the hand of an all-wise Providence could be seen in arranging it so that the most civilized countries of the earth front upon the same ocean—the Atlantic. But the improvement of the steamship is equivalent to the reduction of distance, and this added to the establishment of bases of traffic virtually narrows the Pacific down to a smaller ocean than the Atlantic used to be. Thus America, between the great manufacturing centers of Europe and the greatest of markets in Asia, with the best of pathways to each, seems destined to become the central market of the world; and with the Nicaragua canal severing the Isthmus and the cable crossing the Pacific her position will be made all the more central as well as defensible.