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G E N E RA L L I B R A R Y of the
UNIVERSITY OF MI C H IGAN
PRESENTED BY.

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GREATER AMERICA.
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ADDRESS
BY
HON DAVID JºhnLL, LL D.
Assista NT SECRETARY OF STATE.
DELIVERED AT THE ANNUAL BANQUET OF THE ROCHESTER
CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, DECEMBER 8, 1898.
WASHINGTON, D. C.
JUDD & DETWELLER, PRINTERs.
1898.
ig
Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Chamber of Commerce :
It is with a thrill of peculiar pleasure that I greet you *
here tonight. A wanderer upon the face of the earth, I feel
like a returning mariner when the light of his home flashes
out over the sea to salute him, and a great wave of emotion
sweeps from memory the dreary days and perilous nights of
a long and tempestuous voyage. My country—with what
patriotic pride I call it mine !—never seemed so great, its
people so noble, its future and theirs so full of hope and
promise. A great crisis, bravely met and victoriously passed,
lifts a country, as an individual, to a prouder elevation than
before. When last I met with the members of this Chamber
the roar of Niagara blended with the voices of the speakers,
but a power greater and more irresistible than that of the
great cataract has changed the destiny of twelve millions of
human beings, and a more potent voice has commanded the
action of this nation and called it to their rescue. Incidents
of an unparalleled nature have kindled a conflagration
which all the waters of Niagara could not quench. The
miraculous feats of our small but illustrious navy fill the
world with wonder, and indicate more eloquently than
human words that the path of the Republic to its place
among the nations lies in the broad highway of the deep.
Our little army, the smallest of any great power in the world,
has swollen in a few months to a mighty host, gathered from
every quarter of the Union, the workshop and the field, the
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lonely ranch and the fashionable club, eager to follow a
common standard and shed its blood upon a common battle-
field. Many a pale face has turned for the last time to the
silent stars of a tropic sky, and a subtler foe than whistling
bullets has racked with agony the mute sufferers in our fever-
stricken camps. Thousands of brave volunteers have almost
wept with disappointment because they could not press to
the front, but when History completes her roll of heroes and
tells their fateful story the untrembling hand which records
the solemn judgment of the world will write:
“They serve as well who only stand and wait.”
Had Napoleon won the victories which have been achieved
under the wise leadership of our great President, a new em-
pire might have been called into being and this sober Re-
public have been suddenly swept from an era of industrial
peace into an era of unbounded conquest and imperialism.
(But that mistaken word “imperialism,” suggested by the
unexpected fruits of victory, does not express the motives
and sentiments of this nation. The American people have
not coveted territories beyond the sea. They have engaged
in war not for land, but for humanity; not to multiply their
possessions, but to vindicate their principles. Empires are
made by personal ambitions, but the history of our great
moments of victory is the roll-call of sacrifice.) The struggle
for independence reached its culmination in Washington's
refusal of a crown, and the perpetual union of the States
was sealed by a bleeding nation's supreme renunciation in
the martyrdom of Lincoln. [In the solemn moment when
the ways parted at the mile-stone of intervention in the
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tragedy of Cuba's wrongs, the one leading to national hu-
miliation, the other to manifest duty,+the serene voice of
our great, peace-loving statesman, William McKinley, whose
large intelligence turned with sadness from the sweet vision
of peace, recalled to the nation the noble sentiment,
“He is thrice armed who hath his quarrel just.” J
Then, panoplied in the confidence of the people, he who
was the last to abandon peace stood first in the hour of war,
not to acquire new dominion, but toſextend the rule of jus-
tice. J -
And now that victory has placed the fate of twelve mil-
lion human beings in the hands of a triumphant nation,
with what right does a spirit of criticism, which derives its
inspiration from conditions that have ceased, stamp with
the word “imperialism" the magnanimity of this Republic
in extending the sheltering wings of its protection over those
whom the war has liberated from oppression and misrule?
The momentous question presented to the Government of
the United States by the results of the war has been :[*Hav-
ing attempted by humanitarian intervention, and without
ulterior purposes, to stop the horrors of a perennial strife,
shall the American people, for fear of new responsibilities,
hurl these millions back into the abyss of anarchy?”) That
is the question which our Commissioners have tried to
answer at Paris, and which this nation must answer before
the Throne of Eternal Justice. -
What, now, will our national legislators do with the terri-
tories ceded by Spain to the United States? Will they re-
store them to the vengeance of the vanquished ? Will they
6
leave them to the occupation and partition of other powers?
Will they abandon them to their own inexperience and in-
ternal discords, or will they attempt to establish within them
the conditions of peace and ultimate self-government?
There is nothing novel in the idea of territorial expan-
sion, which has marked every period of our national history.
Only a little strip of territory along the Atlantic seaboard
was peopled by the victorious colonies at the close of the
war of independence, but the American Commissioners were
instructed to claim for the colonies the whole area east of
the Mississippi. Franklin, the most astute diplomatist of .
his time, coveted in addition the whole of Canada. In 1803
Jefferson strained the Constitution to the breaking point, as
he believed, to secure the purchase of the great province of
Louisiana, which at one stroke doubled the area of the
country. His opponents considered his act not only uncon-
stitutional, but in effect a dissolution of the Union; and a
historian has accused him of “making himself monarch of
the new territory, and of holding, against its protests, the
power of its old kings.” Jackson did not hesitate to invade
and conquer Florida for the peace of the nation, Texas came
into the Union by revolution, and the entire tract which
now forms the prosperous States stretching from Mexico to
Oregon was the fruit of war and forced occupation. Thus,
by continued territorial expansion, the better part of this
continent has become incorporated into the United States,
and from a few scattered settlements along our eastern coast,
a great nation has been formed, bounded by two oceans,
with widespread commerce over both, and not one human
being in all this vast continental area regrets for a moment
7
the historic necessities which have given to our united Re-
public a common law and a common liberty.
New conditions of existence have swept away forever the
fears and misgivings which were felt at every thrilling act
in this great drama of continental expansion. Undreamed
of facilities of transportation have wrought this wonder and
rendered possible the unity and solidarity of so vast an en-
terprise. The power of steam locomotion has carried west-
ward a vigorous race, planting homes like those of New
England upon the sunny slopes of the Pacific, and our orig-
inal western boundary, the Mississippi, has become the cen-
tral waterway of a united nation, bordering upon widely
separated seas. Is our expansion to be bounded by these
great waters, or will the annihilation of space by mechanical
energy permit of a still wider horizon 2 Having won from
nature and untitled claimants the possession of what is most
desirable upon this continent, shall we henceforth renounce
all dominion upon the sea? Shall we declare that the ocean,
whose broad bosom makes the whole world one, has only
perils for our commerce and our polity? Jefferson, indeed,
once said that our national ambition should be limited to
possessions that would not need a navy to defend them; but
that was long ago. Could he contemplate the map of the
United States today, an area connecting the two great oceans
of the temperate zone, and believe, in the presence of modern
battle-ships, that our present territories could be defended
without a navy 7 Could he imagine that the late war could
have been conducted, or that our seaboard cities could have
escaped destruction without a navy 2 Would he not rather
believe that, with friendly neighbors on the north and south
8
and our points of exposure chiefly on our coasts, our princi-
- pal need of defense is a still greater navy 2 .
We seem, indeed, to have renounced our hope of primacy
upon the ocean by suffering the decline of our mercantile
marine, and that, too, in an era when the forces of industrial
production have far outstripped the development of markets.
In 1860 the merchant navy of the United States was, after
that of England, the largest in the world. Seventy per cent.
of our foreign trade was then carried by our own vessels, but
the proportion has declined until now all but 11 per cent.
has been taken from us, while England's carrying trade has
in the meantime doubled ; yet, notwithstanding this, our
annual trade with Asia and Oceanica has grown to
$62,000,000, nearly twice our entire trade with Central and
South America. Our exports to China have trebled since
1890, and our entire volume of trade with that country is now
equal to that of the whole of continental Europe, outside of
Russia. The Far East has become the land of promise for
the merchant, and Civilization, full-grown, having made the
circuit of the globe, returns with priceless treasures to its
primitive cradle, to lay them at the shrine of its nativity.
Having created and developed our industries by a judi-
cious system of protection until we can successfully compete
with foreign nations by the greater inventive powers of our
people and the more extended application of machinery,
shall we now refuse to protect our commerce? Shall we
forget that we are no longer merely an Atlantic, but have
become also a Pacific power, with five thousand miles of
coast line on the Pacific ocean? Shall we forget that the
people of the Great West will be more closely in sympathy
with their fellow-citizens of the East, if they also have their
9
maritime cities and their proportion of international trade?
And, finally, shall we forget that the political subdivision
and commercial occupation of Asia by foreign powers in-
volves the perpetual isolation of this continent?
[The destiny of nations is not determined by the individual
will, nor can national duties be measured by private stand-
ards. Nations grow by obeying the instinct of development, .
an instinct planted in them by Him who holdeth the sea as
in the hollow of his hand. Their greatness is not in the
breadth of their heritage, nor in the fertility of their lands,
nor in the wealth of their mines.) Little Israel has given
the law of righteousness to the ends of the earth; little
Greece has shaped the humanities for all time; little Hol-
land, pushing back the sea with one hand, has distributed
the wealth of the world with the other; little Switzerland
has shone like a star of Heaven, guarding her liberties
among the Snowy fastnesses of her Alpine peaks and
glaciers; little New England has nurtured her Puritans and
sent forth her teachers of self-government; but it is one
mission to prepare the seed, another to scatter it. I cannot
believe it an evil for any people that the Stars and Stripes,
the symbol of liberty and law, should float over them.
There have been those who have thought otherwise, but
they have returned with penitence and confession when their
dream was ended. There was a day when the sovereign
power of this nation was thought to conflict with the rights
of individuals and communities to go their ways and shape
their own destinies, but one of the most precious fruits of
the late war is the new evidence that the nation has a truer
instinct than the individual. When a lady congratulated
“Joe Wheeler,” as we lovingly call him, upon his promotion
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as major general, the brave old soldier burst into tears and
said: “It is not that, Madam, which gives me most pleasure;
it is to have fought under the dear old Flag that bears the
Stars and Stripes!”
Greater America will lose her greatness if she forgets the
political philosophy that has made her great. The vital
principle of that philosophy is the sovereignty of the people,
which in the last analysis is only another name for the fact
that in every humblest creature possessing intelligence there
is a spark of that Divine Reason which animates the world.
It is a great lesson of the war that it is not in the tonnage of
ships, nor in the weight of armor, that the fate of battles
rests. “These are Her Majesty's ships,” says the Spaniard;
“These are our ships,” says the American ; and your pleas-
ure yacht, with a Wainwright in command, sends the terror-
striking destroyers to the bottom of the sea The sover-
eignty of the people behind the guns and in the trenches,
whether the soldier be a New York dude or a Texas ranch-
man, speaks in his aim and in his heroism ; for he does not
merely represent, he helps to constitute, the sovereignty of
the nation.
A giant's task now confronts the American people, but
their history gives the assurance that they will not tremble
before it. Amid the din of war and the strife of nations, in
the busy marts of trade and among the distant islands of the
sea, dwells an unseen force slowly shaping the destinies of
the world. It speaks alike in nature, in the human soul
and in the long drama of history. Witness a nation rising
to the full splendor of its responsibilities, and you will see
there written in letters of shining light, the august and im-
perative law of universal development.
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