ats. Along the line of the
Alleghanies like an advancing column, the forces of Northern capital,
textile and steel mills, year after year extend their invasion into the
lower South. New Orleans, once the mistress of the commerce of the
Mississippi Valley, is awakening to new dreams of world commerce. On the
southern border, similar invasions of American capital have been
entering Mexico. At the same time, the opening of the Panama Canal has
completed the dream of the ages of the Straits of Anian between Atlantic
and Pacific. Four hundred years ago, Balboa raised the flag of Spain at
the edge of the Sea of the West and we are now preparing to celebrate
both that anniversary, and the piercing of the continent. New relations
have been created between Spanish America and the United States and the
world is watching the mediation of Argentina, Brazil and Chile between
the contending forces of Mexico and the Union. Once more alien national
interests lie threatening at our borders, but we no longer appeal to the
Monroe Doctrine and send our armies of frontiersmen to settle our
concerns off-hand. We take council with European nations and with the
sisterhood of South America, and propose a remedy of social
reorganization in place of imperious will and force. Whether the effort
will succeed or not, it is a significant indication that an old order is
passing away, when such a solution is undertaken by a President of
Scotch Presbyterian stock, born in the State of Virginia.

If we turn to the Northern border, where we are about to celebrate a
century of peace with England, we see in progress, like a belated
procession of our own history the spread of pioneers, the opening of new
wildernesses, the building of new cities, the growth of a new and mighty
nation. That old American advance of the wheat farmer from the
Connecticut to the Mohawk, and the Genesee, from the Great Valley of
Pennsylvania to the Ohio Valley and the prairies of the Middle West, is
now by its own momentum and under the stimulus of Canadian homesteads
and the high price of wheat, carried across the national border to the
once lone plains where the Hudson Bay dog trains crossed the desolate
snows of the wild North Land. In the Pacific Northwest the era of
construction has not ended, but it is so rapidly in progress that we can
already see the closing of the age of the pioneer. Already Alaska
beckons on the north, and pointing to her wealth of natural resources
asks