but a doer of deeds that explain themselves; a man with imagination,
not fantastic but realistic, who must have had a vision during the
night after the May-day battle of what might be the great hereafter;
beholding under the southern constellations the gigantic shadow of
America, crowned with stars, with the archipelagoes of Asia under
her feet and broad and mighty destinies at command.

It was the next day that he anchored precisely where his famous ship
was swinging when I sat beside him; and his words to the representative
of three centuries of Spanish misrule had in them an uncontemplated
flash from the flint and steel of fixed purpose and imperial
force. "Fire another gun at my ships and I will destroy your city."

We can hardly realize in America how flagrant Europeanism has been in
the Manila Bay; how the big German guns bought by Spain looked from
their embrasures; how a powerful German fleet persisted in asserting
antagonism to Americanism, and tested in many ways the American
Admiral's knowledge of his rights and his country's policy until
Admiral Dewey told, not the German Admiral, as has been reported,
but his flag lieutenant, "Can it be possible that your nation means
war with mine? If so, we can begin it in five minutes." The limit
had been reached, and the line was drawn; and Dewey's words will go
down in our records with those of Charles Francis Adams to Lord John
Russell about the ironclads built in England for the Confederacy:
"My Lord, I need not point out to your lordship that this is war."

Perhaps the German Admiral had exceeded the instructions of his
Imperial Government, and the peremptory words of the American Admiral
caused a better understanding, making for peace rather than for war.