Occasion of serious difficulty, indeed, should not arise here.  Unlike the historical instance just cited, the two nations whose interests have come now into contact—­Great Britain and the United States—­are so alike in inherited traditions, habits of thought, and views of right, that injury to the one need not be anticipated from the predominance of the other in a quarter where its interests also predominate.  Despite the heterogeneous character of the immigration which the past few years have been pouring into our country, our political traditions and racial characteristics still continue English—­Mr. Douglas Campbell would say Dutch, but even so the stock is the same.  Though thus somewhat gorged with food not wholly to its taste, our political digestion has contrived so far to master the incongruous mass of materials it has been unable to reject; and if assimilation has been at times imperfect, our political constitution and spirit remain English in essential features.  Imbued with like ideals of liberty, of law, of right, certainly not less progressive than our kin beyond sea, we are, in the safeguards deliberately placed around our fundamental law, even more conservative than they.  That which we received of the true spirit of freedom we have kept—­liberty and law—­not the one or the other, but both.  In that spirit we not only have occupied our original inheritance, but also, step by step, as Rome incorporated the other nations of the peninsula, we have added to it, spreading and perpetuating everywhere the same foundation principles of free and good government which, to her honor be it said, Great Britain also has maintained throughout her course.  And now, arrested on the south by the rights of a race wholly alien to us, and on the north by a body of states of like traditions to our own, whose freedom to choose their own affiliations we respect, we have come to the sea.  In our infancy we bordered upon the Atlantic only; our youth carried our boundary to the Gulf of Mexico; to-day maturity sees us upon the Pacific.  Have we no right or no call to progress farther in any direction?  Are there for us beyond the sea horizon none of those essential interests, of those evident dangers, which impose a policy and confer rights?

This is the question that long has been looming upon the brow of a future now rapidly passing into the present.  Of it the Hawaiian incident is a part—­intrinsically, perhaps, a small part—­but in its relations to the whole so vital that, as has been said before, a wrong decision does not stand by itself, but involves, not only in principle but in fact, recession along the whole line.  In our natural, necessary, irrepressible expansion, we are come here into contact with the progress of another great people, the law of whose being has impressed upon it a principle of growth which has wrought mightily in the past, and in the present is visible by recurring manifestations.  Of this working, Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Egypt,