act, and to reach their own equilibrium without extraneous interference.  Nor are such periods confined to the early days of mere lawlessness.  They recur whenever a crisis is reached in the career of a nation; when old traditions, accepted maxims, or written constitutions have been outgrown, in whole or in part; when the time has come for a people to recognize that the limits imposed upon its expansion, by the political wisdom of its forefathers, have ceased to be applicable to its own changed conditions and those of the world.  The question then raised is not whether the constitution, as written, shall be respected.  It is how to reach modifications in the constitution—­and that betimes—­so that the genius and awakened intelligence of the people may be free to act, without violating that respect for its fundamental law upon which national stability ultimately depends.  It is a curious feature of our current journalism that it is clear-sighted and prompt to see the unfortunate trammels in which certain of our religious bodies are held, by the cast-iron tenets imposed upon them by a past generation, while at the same time political tenets, similarly ancient, and imposed with a like ignorance of a future which is our present, are invoked freely to forbid this nation from extending its power and necessary enterprise into and beyond the seas, to which on every side it now has attained.

During the critical centuries when Great Britain was passing through that protracted phase of her history in which, from one of the least among states, she became, through the power of the sea, the very keystone and foundation upon which rested the commercial—­for a time even the political—­fabric of Europe, the free action of her statesmen and people was clogged by no uneasy sense that the national genius was in conflict with artificial, self-imposed restrictions.  She plunged into the brawl of nations that followed the discovery of a new world, of an unoccupied if not unclaimed inheritance, with a vigor and an initiative which gained ever-accelerated momentum and power as the years rolled by.  Far and wide, in every sea, through every clime, her seamen and her colonists spread; but while their political genius and traditions enabled them, in regions adapted to the physical well-being of the race, to found self-governing colonies which have developed into one of the greatest, of free states, they did not find, and never have found, that the possession of and rule over barbarous, or semi-civilized, or inert tropical communities, were inconsistent with the maintenance of political liberty in the mother country.  The sturdy vigor of the broad principle of freedom in the national life is attested sufficiently by centuries of steady growth, that surest evidence of robust vitality.  But, while conforming in the long run to the dictates of natural justice, no feeble scrupulosity impeded the nation’s advance to power, by which alone its mission and the law of its being could be fulfilled.  No artificial fetters were forged to cramp the action of the state, nor was it drugged with political narcotics to dwarf its growth.