here
was the direct sequence of a corollary to its proposition. The
hostilities with Spain brought doubtless the usual train of
sufferings, but these were not on such a scale as in themselves to
provoke an outcry for universal peace. The political consequences, on
the other hand, were much in excess of those commonly resultant from
war,--even from maritime war. The quiet, superficially peaceful
progress with which Russia was successfully advancing her boundaries
in Asia, adding gain to gain, unrestrained and apparently
irrestrainable, was suddenly confronted with the appearance of the
United States in the Philippines, under conditions which made
inevitable both a continuance of occupancy and a great increase of
military and naval strength. This intrusion, into a sphere hitherto
alien to it, of a new military power, capable of becoming one of the
first force, if it so willed, was momentous in itself; but it was
attended further with circumstances which caused Great Britain, and
Great Britain alone among the nations of the earth, to appear the
friend of the United States in the latter's conflict. How this
friendliness was emphasized in the Philippines is a matter of common
report.

Coincident with all this, though also partly preceding it, has been
the growing recognition by the western nations, and by Japan, of the
imminence of great political issues at stake in the near future of
China. Whether regarded as a field for commerce, or for the exercise
of the varied activities by which the waste places of the earth are
redeemed and developed, it is evidently a matter of economical--and
therefore of political--importance to civilized nations to prevent the
too preponderant control there of any one of their number, lest the
energies of their own citizens be debarred from a fair opportunity to
share in these advantages. The present conditions, and the recent
manifestations of antagonism and rivalry, are too well known for
repetition. The general situation is sufficiently understood, yet it
is doubtful whether the completeness and rapidity of the revolution
which has taken place in men's thoughts about the Pacific are duly
appreciated. They are shown not only by overt aggressive demands of
various European states, or by the extraordinary change of sentiment
on the subject of expansion that has swept over America, but very
emphatically by the fact, little noted yet well assured, that leading
statesmen of Japan--which only three