Page 54 - The Interest of America in Sea Power Present and Future

Hawaii and our Future Sea Power. 35

tainly not less progressive than our kin be-
yond sea, we are, in the safeguards deliberately
placed around our fundamental law, even more
conservative than they. That which we re-
ceived 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 through-
out 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 boun-
dary 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