Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II OUR DIPLOMATIC POSITION THE United States stands to-day as the great arbiter of the western hemisphere. It has expanded, by conquest and purchase, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Its northern border touches the frontier of Canada, its southern boundary is washed by the waters of the Rio Grande. Conquest has carried the American symbol of sovereignty into the waters of the Pacific to the very gateway of China. The Caribbean, once the spoil of European nations, now may be said to be almost Americanized by our acquisition of Puerto Rico, by our virtual political domination of these islands still under the rule of tropical races, and by our possession of the Canal route across the Isthmus of Panama, through which will soon pass the commerce of the world. We have, in our hands, the making of a great empire?not an empire of kings, but an empire in whose womb lies the seed of the nation's fundamental beliefs, recorded with such clearness in the Declaration of Independence. The power isours, if we are men enough to grasp it, to give to the great world over which our policies have flung their protecting arm those principles of social life to us now fundamental: "that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." The individual has no right to regard the state as a means for attaining his own ambitions. The nation owes a duty to posterity which can be performed only through the self-sacrifice of the nation to-day. The territories over which flies the American flag, and those territories over which our institutions have spread...