peninsula, where her people can do as they please with each other, but whence they can trouble the world no more. Spain has ceased to rule; her once vast empire has gone, because she has proved herself unfit to govern, and for the unfit among nations there is no pity in the relentless world-forces which shape the destinies of mankind.

The irrepressible conflict between Spain on the one side and England and Holland on the other, after the former had been crippled in Europe, was transferred from the Old World to the New. They seemed at first very remote from each other in the vast regions of the American continents, but nevertheless the two opposing forces, the two irrevocably hostile systems, were always drawing steadily together, with the certainty that when they met one of them must go down before the other. The Seven Years' War drove France from eastern North America, and fixed forever the fate of that region. It was to be English, not French:

The lilies withered where the lion trod.

The expulsion of France not only removed the long standing northern peril to the English colonies, but swept away the last barrier between them and Spain. In the American Revolution, France, seeking her revenge for the conquests of Pitt, forced Spain to become her ally against England; but Spain had no love for the rebellious colonists. A treacherous, nominal friend, she tried to wrest advantage from their weakness, and to secure to herself in final possession the Mississippi valley and the great Northwest. Failing in this, she sought, after American independence had been won, by

false and insolent diplomacy and by corrupting intrigues among the Western settlers, to check the American advance across the continent. It was all in vain. Through woodland and savanna, over mountain and stream, came the steady tramp of the American pioneer. He was an adventurer, but he was also a settler, and what he took he held. He carried a rifle in one hand, he bore an axe in the other, and where he camped he made a clearing and built a home. The two inevitable antagonists were nearing each other at last, for they were face to face now all along the western and southern borders of the United States. The time had come for one to stop, or for the other to give way. But there was no stopping possible to the Americans, and through the medium of French ownership the Louisiana purchase was made, the Mississippi became a river of the United States, and their possessions were stretched across the continent even to the slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Still not content, the Americans pressed upon the southern boundary until, in 1819, they forced Spain, in order to avoid war, to sell them Florida and the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico as far as Louisiana. Meantime, inspired by the example of the United States in rejecting foreign dominion, and borne forward by the great democratic movement which, originating in America, had swept over Europe, the Spanish colonies rose in arms and drove Spain from Central and South America.

A few years passed by, and then the restless American advance pressed on into Texas, took it from Mexico, and a territory larger than any European state except Russia was added to the United States. Still the

American march went on, and then war came with Mexico, and another vast region, stretching from Oregon to Arizona, became an American possession. All the lands of North America which had once called Spain master, which Cortez and De Soto, Ponce de Leon and Coronado, had bestowed upon the Spanish crown, had passed from the hands of the men who could not use them into those of the men who could. The expulsion of Spain from the Antilles is merely the last and final step of the inexorable movement in which the United States has been engaged for nearly a century. By influence and example, or more directly by arms and by the pressure of ever-advancing settlements, the United States drove Spain from all her continental possessions in the Western Hemisphere, until nothing was left to the successors of Charles and Philip but Cuba and Puerto Rico.

How did it happen that this great movement, at once racial, political, and economic, governed as it was by forces which rule men even in their own despite-how did it happen to stop when it came to the ocean's edge? The movement against Spain was at once natural and organic, while the pause on the sea-coast was artificial and in contravention of the laws of political evolution in the Americas. The conditions in Cuba and Puerto Rico did not differ from those which had gone down in ruin wherever the flag of Spain waved upon the mainland. The Cubans desired freedom, and Bolivar would fain have gone to their aid. Mexico and Colombia, in 1825, planned to invade the island, and at that time invasion was sure to be successful. What power stayed the oncoming tide which had swept over a continent? Not

Cuban loyalty, for the expression "Faithful Cuba" was a lie from the beginning, like many other Spanish statements. The power which prevented the liberation of Cuba was the United States; and more than seventy years later this republic has had to fight a war because at the appointed time she set herself against her own teachings, and brought to a halt the movement she had herself started to free the New World from the oppression of the Old. The United States held back Mexico and Colombia and Bolivar, used her influence at home and abroad to that end, and, in the opinion of contemporary mankind, succeeded, according to her desires, in keeping Cuba under the dominion of Spain.

The reason for this action on the part of the United States is worse than the fact itself. The Latin mind is severely logical in politics, which accounts in a measure for its many failures in establishing and managing free governments. Being of this cast of mind, the SpanishAmerican states, when they rose to free themselves from Spain, also freed their own slaves, and in this instance they were not only logical, but right. The people of the United States, on the other hand, were at once illogical and wrong, for they held just then that white men should be free and black men slaves. So they regarded with great disfavor this highly logical outcome of South-American independence, and from this cause Southern hostility brought the Panama Congress, fraught with many high hopes of American solidarity, to naught. The sinister influence of slavery led the United States to hold Cuba under the yoke of Spain, because free negroes were not to be permitted to exist upon an island so near their Atlantic seaboard. It

was a cruel policy which fastened upon Cuba slavery to Spain as well as the slavery of black men to white, when both might have been swept away without cost to America. Those who are curious in the doctrine of compensations can find here a fresh example. Lincoln, in the second inaugural, declared once for all that our awful Civil War was the price we paid for the sin of slavery; and the war of 1898 was the price paid at last, as such debts always are paid by nations, for having kept Cuba in bondage at the dictates of our own slave power.

The United States had thus undertaken to stop the movement for the liberation of Spanish colonies at the point selected by itself, and had deliberately entered upon the policy of maintaining Spanish rule in its own neighborhood. This policy meant the assumption of a heavy responsibility, as well as a continuous effort to put to rest an unsettled question, by asserting stoutly, and in defiance of facts, that it really was settled if people would only agree pleasantly to think so. But in this, as in all like cases, the effort was vain. Cuba was held under Spanish rule, and the question which had received the wrong answer began almost at once to make itself heard, after the awkward fashion of questions which men pretend to have disposed of, but which are still restlessly seeking the right and final answer, and, without respect for policies or vested interests, keep knocking and crying at the door. Some American statesmen saw that there was a real question in Cuba demanding a real settlement, and declared, like John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, that Cuba must be annexed, and that it would become indispensable to the