of the seas, and consent to it that where we find the white line of surf that borders a continent we shall say to the imperial popular Republic, thus far and no farther shalt thou go, and here shall thy proud march be stayed—­than there was that George Washington, as the representative of the English-speaking people, should have assumed that England and Virginia had no business beyond the Allegheny Mountains, and, above all, no right to territory on the west of the Allegheny and Kanawha, and north of the Ohio river, a territory then remote, inhabited by barbarians and wanted by the French, who claimed the whole continent, except the strip along the Atlantic possessed by the English colonies.  Washington was a believer in the acquisition of the Ohio country.  He was a man who had faith in land—­in ever more land.  It is the same policy to go west now that it was then.  Washington crossed the Allegheny and held the ground.  Jefferson crossed the Mississippi, and sent Louis and Clark to the Pacific; and crossing the great western ocean now is but the logic of going beyond the great western rivers, prairies and mountains then.  We walk in the ways of the fathers when we go conquering and to conquer along the Eastward shores of Asia.

One of the expanding and teeming questions before the world now, and the authority and ability to determine it, is in the hands of the Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the United States, is whether Manila shall become an American city, with all the broad and sweeping significance attaching thereto.  Manila was not dressed for company when I saw her, for she had just emerged from a siege in which the people had suffered much inconvenience and privation.  The water supply was cut off, and the streets were not cleaned.  The hotels were disorganized and the restaurants in confusion.  The trees that once cast a grateful shade along the boulevards, that extended into the country, rudely denuded of their boughs, had the appearance of the skeletons of strange monsters.  The insurgent army was still in the neighborhood in a state of uneasiness, feeling wronged, deprived, as they were, of an opportunity to get even with the Spaniards, by picking out and slaying some of the more virulent offenders.  There was an immense monastery, where hundreds of priests were said to be sheltered, and the insurgents desired to take them into their own hands and make examples of them.  The Spaniards about the streets were becoming complacent.  They had heard of peace, on the basis of Spain giving up every thing, but the Philippines, and there were expectations that the troops withdrawn from Cuba might be sent from Havana to Manila, and then, as soon as the Americans were gone, the islanders could be brought to submission by vastly superior forces.  There were more rations issued to Spanish than to American soldiers, until the division of the Philippine Expedition with Major-General Otis arrived, but the Americans were exclusively responsible