Page:Modern Eloquence - Volume 1.djvu/87
tion, its purpose is to insure the largest freedom to the State, the community and the individual. It is for this reason that democracy is eminently progressive. It grows with the individual. Of necessity, its spirit is of progress. With it expansion is an instinct. It cannot stand still.
It is well to remember this at this important crisis, when our country is confronted with problems greater than any in all its history, with the exception of the civil war. Within twelve months a momentous revolution—or shall I say evolution—has taken place in the spirit and purposes of the American people. Twelve months ago we were a politically isolated Republic. To-day we are a world empire. On the night that the explosion of the "Maine" shook the foundations of the deep in the harbor of Havana, I spoke at a banquet in this city, and, unconscious of that which was then taking place in Havana, and in describing the potential power of the President of the United States, I said: "The President, with a stroke of his pen, could shake the equilibrium of the world." The possibility has become a fact. When George Dewey sailed his little fleet past sleeping forts and over hidden mines and annihilated his opponents, a new epoch in our country and the world was begun, and when the Spanish flag fell from the masthead of the "Reina Cristina" one world empire had ended, another had begun. The President has shaken the political equipoise of nations. In so doing he has followed, and not led, a mysterious and puissant impulse of the people.
Is the Western Hemisphere large enough for the influence and progress of the American people, or must we surrender, commercially and politically, our policy of isolation, and claim an influence which shall be as limitless as the world is round? The Atlantic coast was our cradle; lusty youth found us on the banks of the Mississippi; vigorous maturity has brought us to the Pacific. What of that momentous morrow, the twentieth century? Are we, like Alexander, to stop at the margin of the sea and mourn that it forever bars our further progress, or are we, like the inspired pilot of Genoa, to launch the bark of our national destiny into an unknown sea, in search of new and untried routes to national prosperity?
It is not my purpose to discuss this great and burning