continually, can claim no fixity of allegiance, except where they express, not the policy of a day, but the unchanging dictates of righteousness.  And inasmuch as the path of ideal righteousness is not always plain nor always practicable; as expediency, policy, the choice of the lesser evil, must control at times; as nations, like men, will occasionally differ, honestly but irreconcilably, on questions of right,—­there do arise disputes where agreement cannot be reached, and where the appeal must be made to force, that final factor which underlies the security of civil society even more than it affects the relations of states.  The well-balanced faculties of Washington saw this in his day with absolute clearness.  Jefferson either would not or could not.  That there should be no navy was a cardinal prepossession of his political thought, born of an exaggerated fear of organized military force as a political, factor.  Though possessed with a passion for annexation which dominated much of his political action, he prescribed as the limit of the country’s geographical expansion the line beyond which it would entail the maintenance of a navy.  Yet fate, ironical here as elsewhere in his administration, compelled the recognition that, unless a policy of total seclusion is adopted,—­if even then,—­it is not necessary to acquire territory beyond sea in order to undergo serious international complications, which could have been avoided much more easily had there been an imposing armed shipping to throw into the scale of the nation’s argument, and to compel the adversary to recognize the impolicy of his course as well as what the United States then claimed to be its wrongfulness.

The difference of conditions between the United States of to-day and of the beginning of this century illustrates aptly how necessary it is to avoid implicit acceptance of precedents, crystallized into maxims, and to seek for the quickening principle which justified, wholly or in part, the policy of one generation, but whose application may insure a very different course of action in a succeeding age.  When the century opened, the United States was not only a continental power, as she now is, but she was one of several, of nearly equal strength as far as North America was concerned, with all of whom she had differences arising out of conflicting interests, and with whom, moreover, she was in direct geographical contact,—­a condition which has been recognized usually as entailing peculiar proneness to political friction; for, while the interests of two nations may clash in quarters of the world remote from either, there is both greater frequency and greater bitterness when matters of dispute exist near at home, and especially along an artificial boundary, where the inhabitants of each are directly in contact with the causes of the irritation.  It was therefore the natural and proper aim of the government of that day to abolish the sources of difficulty, by bringing all the territory in question under our