In 1783 the United States had been a little nation with not sufficient inhabitants to fill up its million square miles of territory.Even in 1814 it still reached only to the Rockies and still found a troublesome neighbor lying between it and the Gulf of Mexico.Now with the dawn of the twentieth century it was a power of imperial dimensions, occupying three million square miles between the Atlantic and the Pacific, controlling the Caribbean, and stretching its possessions across the Pacific and up into the Arctic.Its influence was a potent factor in the development of Asia, and it was bound by the bonds of treaties, which it has ever regarded sacred, to assist in the regulation of many matters of world interest.
Nor had the only change during the century been that visible in the United States.The world which seemed so vast and mysterious in 1812 had opened up most of its dark places to the valor of adventurous explorers, of whom the United States had contributed its fair share.The facilities of intercourse had conquered space, and along with its conquest had gone a penetration of the countries of the world by the tourist and the immigrant, the missionary and the trader, so that Terence's statement that nothing human was alien to him had become perforce true of the world.
Nor had the development of governmental organization stood still.
In 1812 the United States was practically the only democratic republic in the world; in 1912 the belief in a government founded on the consent of the governed, and republican in form, had spread over all the Americas, except such portions as were still colonies, and was practically true of even most of them.
Republican institutions had been adopted by France and Portugal, and the spirit of democracy had permeated Great Britain and Norway and was gaining yearly victories elsewhere.In 1912 the giant bulk of China adopted the form of government commended to he; by the experience of the nation which, more than any other, had preserved her integrity.Autocracy and divine right, however, were by no means dead.On the contrary, girt and prepared, they were arming themselves for a final stand.But no longer, as in 1823, was America pitted alone against Europe.It was the world including America which was now divided against itself.
It was chiefly the Spanish War which caused the American people slowly and reluctantly to realize this new state of things--that the ocean was no longer a barrier in a political or military sense, and that the fate of each nation was irrevocably bound up with the fate of all.As the years went by, however, Americans came to see that the isolation proclaimed by President Monroe was no longer real, and that isolation even as a tradition could not, either for good or for ill, long endure.All thoughtful men saw that a new era needed a new policy; the wiser, however, were not willing to give up all that they had acquired in the experience of the past.They remembered that the separation of the continents was not proclaimed as an end in itself but as a means of securing American purposes.Those national purposes had been:
first, the securing of the right of self-government on the part of the United States; second, the securing of the right of other nations to govern themselves.Both of these aims rested on the belief that one nation should not interfere with the domestic affairs of another.These fundamental American purposes remained, but it was plain that the situation would force the nation to find some different method of realizing them.The action of the United States indicated that the hopes of the people ran to the reorganization of the world in such a way as would substitute the arbitrament of courts for that of war.Year by year the nation committed itself more strongly to cooperation foreshadowing such an organization.While this feeling was growing among the people, the number of those who doubted whether such a system could ward off war altogether and forever also increased.Looking forward to the probability of war, they could not fail to fear that the next would prove a world war, and that in the even of such a conflict, the noninterference of the United States would not suffice to preserve it immune in any real independence.
