“It is perhaps impossible for Americans of this day and time to conceive how vast was the control Spain might have exerted over the destinies of our republic.  The independence of the United States had been recognized, the constitution had been adopted and the government organized, and yet for many years she claimed without dispute the peninsula of Florida, thence a strip along the gulf extending to and including the city of New Orleans, and she held all of that territory west of the Mississippi extending from the Father of Waters to the Pacific ocean, and from the Gulf of Mexico northward to the undefined boundaries of the British possessions.

“Even as it is to-day, that empire mentioned in Bishop Berkely’s prophetic stanza, ‘Westward the course of empire takes its way,’ which sprang into being with the first shot of the simple, God-fearing husbandmen on the green at Lexington extends more than half way across the Pacific ocean, and the miner or the fisherman standing on the ultimate island of Alaska and gazing eastward across the icy waters may with the naked eye behold the dominions of the czar.  Nor in this do we include those distant islands, where one May morning, ever to be famous in the annals of our race, the spicy breezes that blow o’er Manila bay were rent by the guns of the noble Dewey as they proclaimed that the genius of liberty had come to rid of cruelty and avarice and crime that charming land ’where every prospect pleases and only man is vile.’

“In this connection may it not be well for us and for some of our distinguished representatives now in Paris to consider if it can be ever possible for men with the American and Spanish ideas of government to live in proximity and in peace?  Contrast the character of the average American citizen with that of the Spaniard.  The native and distinctive modesty of the national character forbids me to pronounce an extravagant eulogium upon the American citizen, but behold him and see what he has done and can do.

“While the human intellect has been making prodigious and unheard-of strides, while the world is ringing with the noise of intellectual achievements, Spain sleeps on untroubled, unheeding, impassive, receiving no impression upon it.  There she lies at the farther extremity of the continent, a huge and torpid mass, the sole representative now remaining of the feelings and knowledge of the middle ages.  And, what is the worst symptom of all, she is satisfied with her own condition.  Though she is the most backward country in Europe she believes herself to be the foremost.  She is proud of everything of which she ought to be ashamed.

“How incompatible is the temperament of the American and the Spaniard.