always plain nor always practicable; as expediency, policy, the choice
of the lesser evil, must control at times; as nations, like men, will
occasionally differ, honestly but irreconcilably, on questions of
right,--there do arise disputes where agreement cannot be reached, and
where the appeal must be made to force, that final factor which
underlies the security of civil society even more than it affects the
relations of states. The well-balanced faculties of Washington saw
this in his day with absolute clearness. Jefferson either would not or
could not. That there should be no navy was a cardinal prepossession
of his political thought, born of an exaggerated fear of organized
military force as a political, factor. Though possessed with a passion
for annexation which dominated much of his political action, he
prescribed as the limit of the country's geographical expansion the
line beyond which it would entail the maintenance of a navy. Yet fate,
ironical here as elsewhere in his administration, compelled the
recognition that, unless a policy of total seclusion is adopted,--if
even then,--it is not necessary to acquire territory beyond sea in
order to undergo serious international complications, which could have
been avoided much more easily had there been an imposing armed
shipping to throw into the scale of the nation's argument, and to
compel the adversary to recognize the impolicy of his course as well
as what the United States then claimed to be its wrongfulness.

The difference of conditions between the United States of to-day and
of the beginning of this century illustrates aptly how necessary it is
to avoid implicit acceptance of precedents, crystallized into maxims,
and to seek for the quickening principle which justified, wholly or in
part, the policy of one generation, but whose application may insure a
very different course of action in a succeeding age. When the century
opened, the United States was not only a continental power, as she now