Our own history since independence is an unbroken record of expansion and imperialism.  Our contiguous territories have been acquired by compulsion, whether of war, of purchase, of occupation, or of exchange.  We have taken advantage of others’ dire necessity in the case of Great Britain, France, Spain, Russia, and Mexico.

To rectify our frontier we compelled the Gladsden Purchase within the writer’s lifetime.  As to our non-contiguous possessions, we hold them by the right of conquest or revolution, salving our consciences with such cash indemnity as we ourselves have chosen to pay, and even now we are considering what we choose to pay, not what a disinterested court might consider adequate, for the good-will of the United States of Colombia, a good-will desired solely and entirely for an additional safeguard to the Panama Canal and a prop to the policy or doctrine substituted by the present Administration for the moribund Monroe Doctrine.

In no single instance of virtual annexation or protectorate have we consulted by popular vote either the desires of those inhabiting the respective territories annexed or The Hague Tribunal.  In every case we have had one single plea and one only—­self-interest.

The entire American continent south of our frontier we have closed to all European settlement, thereby maintaining for more than a century in a magnificent territory an imperfect civilization which makes a sorry use of natural resources which could vastly improve the condition of all mankind if properly used.

This is the light in which European nations see us; our identity in this policy from the dawn of our national existence onward they consider a proof of our national character.  It differs in no respect from their own policies except in one.

But for them this exception is basic.  We are a composite folk and they are homogeneous, their blend being approximately complete.  They have one language, one tradition, one set of institutions and laws; a unity of literature, habits, and method in life.  Some European States are composite, but each component part claims and cultivates its own style and its own principles; each announces itself as a nationality with a life to be maintained and a destiny to be wrought out somehow, either in peace or in conflict.

With perhaps a single exception, they have an overflow of population, due to natural generation, for the comfort and happiness of which they seek either an expansion of territory or an improvement in the productivity of their home lands; for those who must emigrate they passionately desire the perpetuation of their nationality, with all it implies.

In these respects they do not differ from us, except that perhaps we are more determined and imperious.  We cannot think politically in any other terms than those of democratic government, either direct or representative.