t have exerted over the
destinies of our republic. The independence of the United States had
been recognized, the constitution had been adopted and the government
organized, and yet for many years she claimed without dispute the
peninsula of Florida, thence a strip along the gulf extending to and
including the city of New Orleans, and she held all of that territory
west of the Mississippi extending from the Father of Waters to the
Pacific ocean, and from the Gulf of Mexico northward to the undefined
boundaries of the British possessions.

"Even as it is to-day, that empire mentioned in Bishop Berkely's
prophetic stanza, 'Westward the course of empire takes its way,' which
sprang into being with the first shot of the simple, God-fearing
husbandmen on the green at Lexington extends more than half way
across the Pacific ocean, and the miner or the fisherman standing
on the ultimate island of Alaska and gazing eastward across the icy
waters may with the naked eye behold the dominions of the czar. Nor
in this do we include those distant islands, where one May morning,
ever to be famous in the annals of our race, the spicy breezes that
blow o'er Manila bay were rent by the guns of the noble Dewey as they
proclaimed that the genius of liberty had come to rid of cruelty and
avarice and crime that charming land 'where every prospect pleases
and only man is vile.'

"In this connection may it not be well for us and for some of our
distinguished representatives now in Paris to consider if it can
be ever possible for men with the American and Spanish ideas of
government to live in proximity and in peace? Contrast the character
of the average American citizen with that of the Spaniard. The
native and distinctive modesty of the national character forbids
me to pronounce an extravagant eulogium upon the American citizen,
but behold him and see what he has done and can do.

"While the human intellect has been making prodigious and unheard-of
strides, while the world is ringing with the noise of intellectual
achievements, Spain sleeps on untroubled, unheeding, impassive,
receiving no impression upon it. There she lies at the farther
extremity of the continent, a huge and torpid mass, the sole
representative now remaining of the feelings and knowledge of the
middle ages. And, what is the worst symptom of all, she is satisfied
with her own condition. Though she is the most backward country
in Europe she believes herself to be the forem