sed is not whether the constitution, as written,
shall be respected. It is how to reach modifications in the
constitution--and that betimes--so that the genius and awakened
intelligence of the people may be free to act, without violating that
respect for its fundamental law upon which national stability
ultimately depends. It is a curious feature of our current journalism
that it is clear-sighted and prompt to see the unfortunate trammels in
which certain of our religious bodies are held, by the cast-iron
tenets imposed upon them by a past generation, while at the same time
political tenets, similarly ancient, and imposed with a like ignorance
of a future which is our present, are invoked freely to forbid this
nation from extending its power and necessary enterprise into and
beyond the seas, to which on every side it now has attained.

During the critical centuries when Great Britain was passing through
that protracted phase of her history in which, from one of the least
among states, she became, through the power of the sea, the very
keystone and foundation upon which rested the commercial--for a time
even the political--fabric of Europe, the free action of her statesmen
and people was clogged by no uneasy sense that the national genius was
in conflict with artificial, self-imposed restrictions. She plunged
into the brawl of nations that followed the discovery of a new world,
of an unoccupied if not unclaimed inheritance, with a vigor and an
initiative which gained ever-accelerated momentum and power as the
years rolled by. Far and wide, in every sea, through every clime, her
seamen and her colonists spread; but while their political genius and
traditions enabled them, in regions adapted to the physical well-being
of the race, to found self-governing colonies which have developed
into one of the greatest, of free states, they did not find, and never
have found, that the possession of and rule over barbarous, or
semi-civilized, or inert tropical communities, were inconsistent with
the maintenance of political liberty in the mother country. The sturdy
vigor of the broad principle of freedom in the national life is
attested sufficiently by centuries of steady growth, that surest
evidence of robust vitality. But, while conforming in the long run to
the dictates of natural justice, no feeble scrupulosity impeded the
nation's advance to power, by which alone its mission and the law of
its being could be fulfilled. No artific