when
it was ratified, and three years later, when the subject was brought up
in open Senate, he stated at length his views on the whole subject of
our relations with England and Central America, with Spain and Cuba,
with European monarchies and Latin-American states. Whether right or
wrong, they are the views on which the American people have acted as
practical occasions have arisen and bid fair to act in the future.

It would have been possible, he thought, but for Clayton's
mismanagement, to get from Nicaragua a grant to the United States of
exclusive and perpetual control over all railroad and canal routes
through that country from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Instead, we had
pledged ourselves to England "not to do, in all coming time, that which,
in the progress of events, our interests, duty, and even safety may
compel us to do." He opposed the treaty because it invited European
intervention in American affairs; because it denied us the right to
fortify any canal that might be built; because its language was
equivocal in regard to the British protectorate over the Mosquito coast,
and otherwise clearly contrary to the Monroe Doctrine; and because we
made an unnecessary promise never to occupy any part of Central America.
To all these objections, save the last, time has added force; and the
principle of the last is now established in our national policy. That
principle Douglas proclaimed so often that it almost rivals the
principle of popular sovereignty itself in the matter of the frequency
of its appearance in his speeches. "You may make," he declared, "as many
treaties as you please to fetter the limbs of this giant Republic, and
she will burst them all from her, and her course will be onward to a
limit which I will not venture to prescribe." The Alleghanies had not
withheld us from the basin of the Mississippi, nor the Mississippi from
the plains, nor the Rocky Mountains from the Pacific coast. Now that the
Pacific barred our way to the westward, who could say that we might not
turn, or ought not to turn, northward or southward? Later, he came to
contemplate a time when the Pacific might cease to be a barrier: when
our "interests, duty, and even safety" might impel us onward to the
islands of the sea. He would make no pledges for the future. Agreements
not to annex territory might be reasonable in treaties between European
powers, but they were contrary to the spirit of American civilization.
"Europe," he said,