ome involved in controversies
not unlike those which in the middle of the century caused very
serious friction, but which the generation that saw the century open
would have thought too remote for its concern, and certainly wholly
beyond its power to influence.

Religious creeds, dealing with eternal verities, may be susceptible of
a certain permanency of statement; yet even here we in this day have
witnessed the embarrassments of some religious bodies, arising from a
traditional adherence to merely human formulas, which reflect views of
the truth as it appeared to the men who framed them in the distant
past. But political creeds, dealing as they do chiefly with the
transient and shifting conditions of a world which is passing away
continually, can claim no fixity of allegiance, except where they
express, not the policy of a day, but the unchanging dictates of
righteousness. And inasmuch as the path of ideal righteousness is not
always plain nor always practicable; as expediency, policy, the choice
of the lesser evil, must control at times; as nations, like men, will
occasionally differ, honestly but irreconcilably, on questions of
right,--there do arise disputes where agreement cannot be reached, and
where the appeal must be made to force, that final factor which
underlies the security of civil society even more than it affects the
relations of states. The well-balanced faculties of Washington saw
this in his day with absolute clearness. Jefferson either would not or
could not. That there should be no navy was a cardinal prepossession
of his political thought, born of an exaggerated fear of organized
military force as a political, factor. Though possessed with a passion
for annexation which dominated much of his political action, he
prescribed as the limit of the country's geographical expansion the
line beyond which it would entail the maintenance of a navy. Yet fate,
ironical here as elsewhere in his administration, compelled the
recognition that, unless a policy of total seclusion is adopted,--if
even then,--it is not necessary to acquire territory beyond sea in
order to undergo serious international complications, which could have
been avoided much more easily had there been an imposing armed
shipping to throw into the scale of the nation's argument, and to
compel the adversary to recognize the impolicy of his course as well
as what the United States then claimed to be its wrongfulness.

The difference of conditi