Page 276 - The interest of America in sea power, present and future

A Twentieth-Century Outlook. 257

That immense practical difficulties have to be
overcome, in order to realize the ends towards
which such sentiments point, is but a common-
place of human experience in all ages and
countries. They give rise to the ready sneer
of impossible, just as any project of extending
the sphere of the United States, by annexation
or otherwise, is met by the constitutional lion
in the path, which the unwilling or the appre-
hensive is ever sure to find; yet, to use words
of one who never lightly admitted impossibili-
ties, " If a thing is necessary to be done, the
more difficulties, the more necessary to try
to remove them." As sentiment strengthens,
it undermines obstacles, and they crumble
before it.
The same tendency is shown in the undeni-
able disposition of the British people and of

British statesmen to cultivate the good-will of
the United States, and to draw closer the rela-
tions between the two countries. For the
disposition underlying such a tendency Mr. Bal-
four has used an expression, " race patriotism,"
— a phrase which finds its first approximation,
doubtless, in the English-speaking family, but
which may well extend its embrace, in a time
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