cause
she has no direct access to the Atlantic. Great Britain commands that
ocean. The United States has several harbors on the east coast, and
the Gulf of Mexico on the south, while on the west coast there are two
of the most important harbors in the Western Hemisphere opening into
the Pacific Ocean--San Francisco Bay, where come and go the navies of
the world, and Puget Sound, the Mediterranean of America, with its
1,500 miles of coast-line.

4. Navigable rivers. The _Encyclopedia Britannica_ says that the
Mississippi River with its branches affords 35,000 miles of navigable
waterway. All Europe has 17,000 miles, or less than one half the
length of the great central waterway of the United States. It is no
wonder that Napoleon said, "The nation which controls the Mississippi
Valley will be the most powerful nation on earth." There are only two
navigable rivers flowing into the Pacific Ocean in the Western
Hemisphere, the Yukon River, navigable for thirteen hundred miles, and
the Columbia, opening into a great inland empire. Almost the entire
navigable extent of both is within the territory of the United States,
although they drain great sections of Canada.

5. Isolation from other commanding powers. The favorable location of
the United States for internal development is equaled by no other
nation in the world, because of the fact that it is separated by many
thousands of miles of sea from the other world powers of our time.
Great Britain, Germany, France, and Russia must continually guard
their frontiers and are never for a moment free from the tremendous
pressure of mighty and aggressive peoples. Our nation has been favored
with the one great block of territory in the North Temperate Zone,
capable of vast development and with almost infinite variety of soil
and climate, remote from other powers. Otherwise it might have been
necessary for America to devote her strength to defense rather than
the development of her vast resources.

AMERICA HAS QUALITIES OF CHARACTER NEEDED FOR A WORLD TASK

As Emerson has well said, "The true test of civilization is not the
census, not the size of its cities, nor the crops, but in the kind of
men the country turns out." Leroy Beaulieu has this to say about
Americans:

"The history of nations like the history of individuals proves beyond
peradventure that no economic strength, no material prosperity, is
lasting unless it be sustained by real moral worth.

"Moral worth, which in