Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 14.djvu/200

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

ment. Even before the war with Spain, the Editor frequently told his readers that expansion was the rule of national life. "Neither races nor individuals change their 'nature and the laws of history cannot have fallen in sudden impotence in the nineteenth century (April 22, 1893). . . . We shall go on extending our limits, so long as the vital impulse of our nationality is not exhausted. When we lose the impulse to expand, it will be time for some other people to take the primacy of the Western Hemisphere out of our failing hands. "On October 8, 1898, when the war with Spain had delivered the Philippines to the United States, he wrote: "Men and ideas now leap oceans easier than they then (Washington's time) crossed rivers; and the notion that American ideas cannot pass beyond this continent is a strange short-sightedness, reserved fortunately, as we believe, to a small proportion of our people." The new destiny inspired him to appeal to the sentiment and fancy of his readers. When the National Editorial Association assembled in Portland in 1899, he welcomed the members in an address which outlined his conception of the new expansion as follows (July 6):

"The East has been treading on the heels of the West, yet never has overtaken it. Latterly, the West has taken ship on the Pacific, and, through one of the movements of history, has overtaken the East. America has put a new girdle around the earth; arid the West has moved on, till it has reached the gateway of the morning, over by the Orient where the men of the United States are planting the banners of a free civilization. . . . We are now making distant excursions, led thereto by a march of events, whose direction we could not foresee. But wherever we go we shall carry our great national idea, push it to realization and accomplish the great work of organizing into institutions the inalienable rights of man. . . . Realization that our country faces the Pacific as well as the Atlantic starts a new era of our national history, and, indeed, a hew epoch in the history of the world."

A decade after acquisition of the trans-Pacific islands the Editor was as ardent an expansionist as his forebears had been in spreading to Kentucky, Illinois and Oregon. On January 1, 1908, at the time of the round-the-world voyage of the Ameri-