upon a wonderful opportunity it was the privilege of our Government
to secure at large, according to the rights of a victorious Nation
for the people thereof--a chance for the youth of America, like that
of the youth of Great Britain, to realize upon the magnificence of
India; and this is as Dr. Johnson said of the vats and barrels of
the Thrale estate--"the potentiality of wealth beyond the dreams of
avarice." It is a new departure, but not a matter for the panic or
apprehension of conservatism, that the Stars and Stripes float as the
symbol of sovereignty over a group of islands in the waters of Asia,
that are equal to all the West Indies. If we are strangers there now we
shall not be so long. We have a front on the Pacific Ocean, of three
great States--Washington, equal to England; Oregon, whose grandeur
rolls in the sound of her famous name, and incomparable California,
whose title will be the synonym of golden good times forever. The
Philippines are southwest from our western front doors. They have
been the islands of our sunsets in the winter. Now they look to us
for the rosy dawn out of which will come the clear brightness of the
white light of mornings and the fullness of the ripening noons, all
the year around. With our bulk of the North American continent bulging
into both the great oceans, it was foreordained since the beginning
when God created the earth, that we, the possessors of this imperial
American zone, should be a great Asiatic Power. We have it now in
evidence, written in islands among the most gorgeous of those that
shine in the Southern seas--islands that are east from the Atlantic
and west from the Pacific shores of the One Great Republic--that
we may personify hereafter, sitting at the head of the table when
the empires of the earth consult themselves as to the courses of
empire. Our Course of Empire is both east and west.

The contact of American and Asiatic civilization in the Philippines,