Page 55 - The Interest of America in Sea Power Present and Future

36 Hawaii and our Future Sea Power.

dangers, which impose a policy and confer
rights ?
This is the question that long has been
looming upon the brow of a future now rapidly
passing into the present. Of it the Hawaiian
incident is a part— intrinsically, perhaps, a
small part— but in its relations to the whole
so vital that, as has been said before, a wrong
decision does not stand by itself, but involves,
not only in principle but in fact, recession
along the whole line. In our natural, neces-
sary, irrepressible expansion, we are come here
into contact with the progress of another great
people, the law of whose being has impressed
upon it a principle of growth which has wrought
mightily in the past, and in the present is vis-
ible by recurring manifestations. Of this
working, Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Egypt,
Aden, India, in geographical succession though
not in strict order of time, show a completed
chain ; forged link by link, by open force or
politic bargain, but always resulting from the
steady pressure of a national instinct, so power-
ful and so accurate that statesmen of every
school, willing or unwilling, have found them-
selves carried along by a tendency which no in-