ble men differ among themselves as to the
safest path on which to travel toward the common goal, and tho the
dividing ocean, in other ways so much our friend, interposes, for our
case of an island State, or rather for a group of island States,
obstacles from which a continental State like yours is happily
altogether free.

Nobody believes that no difficulties remain. Some of them are obvious.
But the common-sense, the mixture of patience and determination that has
conquered risks and mischiefs in the past, may be trusted with the
future.

Strange and devious are the paths of history. Broad and shining channels
get mysteriously silted up. How many a time what seemed a glorious high
road proves no more than a mule track or mere cul-de-sac. Think of
Canning's flashing boast, when he insisted on the recognition of the
Spanish republics in South America--that he had called a new world into
existence to redress the balance of the old. This is one of the
sayings--of which sort many another might be found--that make the
fortune of a rhetorician, yet stand ill the wear and tear of time and
circumstance. The new world that Canning called into existence has so
far turned out a scene of singular disenchantment.

Tho not without glimpses on occasion of that heroism and courage and
even wisdom that are the attributes of man almost at the worst, the tale
has been too much a tale of anarchy and disaster, still leaving a host
of perplexities for statesmen both in America and Europe. It has left
also to students of a philosophic turn of mind one of the most
interesting of all the problems to be found in the whole field of
social, ecclesiastical, religious, and racial movement. Why is it that
we do not find in the south as we find in the north of this hemisphere a
powerful federation--a great Spanish-American people stretching from the
Rio Grande to Cape Horn? To answer that question would be to shed a
flood of light upon many deep historic forces in the Old World, of
which, after all, these movements of the New are but a prolongation and
more manifest extension.

What more imposing phenomenon does history present to us than the rise
of Spanish power to the pinnacle of greatness and glory in the sixteenth
century? The Mohammedans, after centuries of fierce and stubborn war,
driven back; the whole peninsula brought under a single rule with a
single creed; enormous acquisitions from the Netherlands of Naples,
Sicily, the Canaries; Fran