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even if it would. The economic developments of the nineteenth century have produced a solidarity of humanity which no racial prejudice or international hatred can destroy. Each nation is its brother's keeper, and the greater the power the greater the responsibility. If this be so, no nation owes a greater duty to civilization, to be potential in the councils of the world, than the United States. For it to skulk and shirk behind the selfish policy of isolation and to abdicate a destined world supremacy would be the colossal crime of history. The stern but just law which has governed the nations in all history is that he alone shall have who uses. Of every rotten tree the eternal inquiry of the Great Woodman is heard: "Why cumbereth it the ground?"

I would not be understood, however, as saying that the traditional policy of our country is opposed to colonization. On the contrary, we have been, with the single exception of England, the greatest colonizing power of the world. We are sprung from a race of colonists, the greatest of the world, and their blood flows in our veins. To Massachusetts came the Englishman; to New York, the Dutch; to Delaware, the Swede; to Pennsylvania, the Quaker, the Scotchman, the Welsh and the German; to Virginia, the Cavalier; to Georgia, the Huguenot; to Florida, the Spaniard; to Louisiana, the French, and thus the bravest and wisest colonists of all history constructed the foundations of the American Republic. Since then our entire history has been one of colonial enterprise. The people have always been in advance of the Government, and have sturdily pushed their settlements westward into the unbroken wilderness, and each year reclaimed vaster areas of untrodden land to the uses of civilization. Before the present Constitution was framed, the Continental Congress had persuaded the States to cede their claims to the land west of the Alleghanies to the central government as a national domain for colonial enterprise, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 could still be a model for all colonial government, which we may hereafter acquire. Originally the Alleghanies were regarded as our western boundary, but the people refused to be confined within these narrow limits, and, crossing the mountains, planted their colonies in Tennessee and Ken-