under conditions far less provocative of real European interest than
those which now obtain and are continually growing. Its subsequent
applications have been many and various, and the incidents giving rise
to them have been increasingly important, culminating up to the
present in the growth of the United States to be a great Pacific
power, and in her probable dependence in the near future upon an
Isthmian canal for the freest and most copious intercourse between her
two ocean seaboards. In the elasticity and flexibleness with which the
dogma thus has accommodated itself to varying conditions, rather than
in the strict wording of the original statement, is to be seen the
essential characteristic of a living principle--the recognition,
namely, that not merely the interests of individual citizens, but the
interests of the United States as a nation, are bound up with regions
beyond the sea, not part of our own political domain, in which
therefore, under some imaginable circumstances, we may be forced to
take action.

It is important to recognize this, for it will help clear away the
error from a somewhat misleading statement frequently made,--that the
United States needs a navy for defence only, adding often,
explanatorily, for the defence of our own coasts. Now in a certain
sense we all want a navy for defence only. It is to be hoped that the
United States will never seek war except for the defence of her
rights, her obligations, or her necessary interests. In that sense our
policy may always be defensive only, although it may compel us at
times to steps justified rather by expediency--the choice of the
lesser evil--than by incontrovertible right. But if we have interests
beyond sea which a navy may have to protect, it plainly follows that
the navy has more to do, even in war, than to defend the coast; and it
must be added as a received military axiom that war, however defensive