OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE SOCIAL AND TERRITORIAL BY EDWIN ERLE SPARKS, Ph.D. ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN HISTORY, THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO CHICAGO SCOTT, FORESMAN AND COMPANY 1900 THE EXPANSION OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE It is generally conceded that the isolation of America from the world's politics is ending with the close of the century; that the four hundred years of new-world preparation is completed; and that, regardless of questions of ethics or even expediency, the old conditions can never return. This changed position is due especially to the United States. Among the other peoples of America, the slow process of evolution is steadily making for better things than they have known; but the United States has experienced one of those sudden commercial and even external political revolutions, which come without choice and with resistless force. So gradually did evolution prepare the way for this revolution that not the keenest prophet of statescraft foretold the arrival of the United States at its majority. The continent had been crossed, the distant brought near, internal commerce satiated, adjacent foreign trade inaugurated, and a restlessness born of conscious strength and superiority had become manifest. Conviction of the ability to do but precedes the doing. The present time in the United States seems, therefore, to warrant some retrospect of the past; some attempt to collect the details of this making of a nation; some setting forth of the hardships, the problems, the mistakes, and the triumphs of our forefathers. |