According to all trustworthy accounts the recent Presidential election in the United States was the dullest that has been witnessed for some decades. All the recognized mechanical incentives to popular enthusiasm were employed; but the public declined to "enthuse," despite the parades, the fireworks, the advertisements, the professional oratory, and the desperate efforts of the journalists to work their readers into the customary quadrennial paroxysm. Outside the Southern States the great majority of respectable Americans had made up their minds that Mr. Roosevelt was going to be elected, and the minority were not seriously disturbed at the prospect. As a show, the campaign, on either side, was a failure; it filled the newspapers, but the people turned aside from the close-printed columns, and were more interested in the visit of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the singular conjunction of the Church and the World, as illustrated by the hobnobbing of his Grace with Mr. Pierpont Morgan. Yet this "apathy," as

we call it in our politics, disappeared at the polling-booths. The electors did not fail to exercise their suffrage, and they gave a record vote. The majority for President Roosevelt is the largest in the history of the Union; no man, so far as we know, has ever been appointed to any place or office by the choice of so overwhelming a multitude of his fellow-citizens. Perhaps, then, the Presidential electors did not regard the event with indifference. But they knew that the result was a foregone conclusion and they saw no reason for making a fuss over it in advance. The Americans are a sentimental, but at the same time a practical people.

From the practical point of view, they must know that it is not a light thing they have done. The re-election of Mr. Roosevelt to power, with this tremendous national "mandate" behind him, may have important consequences for the United States, and for other countries as well. For the next four years, and perhaps for the next eight, the executive of the largest

homogeneous civilized population in the world will be controlled by the foremost representative of American self-assertion in international politics. Imperialism was the most vital of the issues involved in the electoral campaign. Most of the other differences between the parties were blurred or shadowy. The Tariff was introduced pro forma, but no one really believes that there is any substantial divergence of principle on that point. High Protection has probably reached its zenith, and may begin to slope very slowly downwards, no matter which party is in power; neither of them could, or would, venture on any substantial advance towards genuine Free Trade. The defeat of the Bryanite Democrats at St. Louis has taken the currency out of party politics. On the Trusts, both say a good deal, and say it with equal obscurity.

In all these matters the elector might easily feel that there was little to choose between Judge Parker and Mr. Roosevelt. But in temperament, in character, and in their outlook on affairs, there is a good deal to choose. The personality of the President was the real electoral asset of the Republicans, just as it was the strongest "plank" in the platform of the Democrats. Mr. Roosevelt was denounced as a kind of prancing Proconsul, an American Boulanger, who might perhaps use his 60,000 soldiers to subvert the Constitution, and would in any case be sure to plunge the Union into the welter of world-politics, and hurry it upon every sort of aggressive adventure. Mr. Bryan says that the President's "big stick" policy, his "physical enthusiasm and love for war," are a direct menace to constitutional government, and a cause of justifiable alarm. The majority of American voters were, however, not alarmed. They do not believe in Mr. Bryan's phantasmal Cæsarism; they know well

enough that the liberties of eighty millions of people are in no danger from an army smaller than that of Belgium. They prefer the big stick to the painted reed. "The subject of Imperialism," says Mr. Bryan, "is, all things considered, the most important of the questions at issue between the parties." If that is true, the Imperialists have won a striking victory. The policy of Mr. Roosevelt in China, in Central America, in South America, towards Germany, towards Turkey, towards Russia, has been endorsed by the constituencies. The President and the Secretary of State are enabled, they are indeed encouraged, to carry it further.

And carried further it probably will be. On the very morrow of the elections two important pieces of information were cabled from America. The one was the announcement that the State Department had proposed to confer with the British Government on the subject of an Anglo-American Treaty of Arbitration; the other, that the Navy Construction Board had propounded a ship-building scheme, which, if accepted by Congress, will make the United States the third, if not the second, maritime Power in the two hemispheres, within a very few years. We must take these two items together, and put them side by side with the intelligence that the President's invitation to the Powers to enter upon another Peace Conference had taken definite shape. They are parts of a scheme which seems to have been forming in the ambitious and comprehensive intellect of the American statesman. It is the big stick in a different form from that in which it presents itself to the indignant Democratic imagination-the truncheon of the policeman, not the bludgeon of the swashbuckler.

American opinion is undergoing a gradual evolution on these subjects, of which a stage is marked by the voting

for the Electoral Colleges. On the one hand, by temperament and tradition, the people of the United States are eminently conservative in foreign affairs. They are easily moved by bluster and patriotic jingoism, especially at elections; and at a time, not distant, though happily now past, they rather enjoyed the sport of twisting the lion's tail. But the great steadygoing mass of middle-class people, mostly of Anglo-Saxon descent, who are the real rulers of the comglomerate nationality, have been brought up to a rooted belief in American political isolation. They would fight at any time to keep European aggression out of the two Americas; but, apart from this, they have a deep distrust of mixing themselves up with the tangled politics of the older nations. They have always endeavored to persuade themselves that America was a separate enclave, and that it could survey the wars and diplomacies of Europe and Asia with serene indifference, listening uumoved to the far-off echoes of strife that rolled faintly across the Atlantic and the Pacific. But times have changed. For political purposes the Ocean has narrowed to a stream. The United States is itself a country with foreign dependencies, and in the Philippines it has its finger close to the throbbing pulse of Asia. It has ceased to be self-contained and self-dependent. With a gigantic export trade, still growing, which may presently be as large as that of all Europe, it cannot be indifferent to the political conditions of those vast reservoirs of humanity in which it must find its markets. Its citizens begin to discern the close relation between international politics and international trade; and they are learning the lesson, mastered so reluctantly by ourselves through the troubled centuries, that no community, however great and however powerful, can release itself from the play of the

forces that hold the peoples of this planet together or apart.

This truth is being brought slowly home to the American intelligence; but it is received doubtfully, and with more anxiety than enthusiasm. The AngloSaxon, utriusque juris, is essentially an isolation-loving, individualistic, person, whose aim is to "keep himself to himself," and to meddle with nobody who does not meddle with him. He likes to get behind a ring-fence, when he can. In that umbrageous heart of Sussex, where so much of immemorial antiquity still lingers, you may sometimes find an ancient farm, spaced off from the whispering woodlands by a broad belt of untilled pasture. It is the mark of the primitive hamlet community founded some thirteen centuries ago by a family of Teutonic or Scandinavian Colonists. Here they settled, these pioneers from beyond the Northern Sea; they built their dwellinghouses, their granaries, their cattlebyres; and round the whole they drew their tun or zareeba-like hedge of thorn and box, girt by the wide zone of rough grass and weed, that islanded them from an intrusive world.

The characteristic has survived through the ages. In national, as well as domestic, affairs, non-intervention, laissez-faire, the policy of letting alone, and individual effort, are the aims of the race. They are aims which have been frustrated from generation to generation, constantly abandoned in practice, yet perpetually asserted in theory. There is some truth in the reproach of foreign critics that we have gone about the earth, interfering with everybody, and protesting all the while that we only wanted to be allowed to get on with our own business and had no concern with other people's quarrels. But the fact is that almost every great English statesman and ruler, while genuinely anxious to limit the sphere of British activity abroad,

has found himself compelled to enlarge it. A great nation is irresistibly drawn into the cosmic states-system, and must play its part there, if it would maintain its dignity and safety. China lies at the mercy of foreign aggression, as the penalty for living too long in a world of its own.

Mr. Roosevelt was among the first of distinguished American public men to understand the application of these facts to the United States. Several years ago he put the case boldly:

We cannot be huddled within our own borders and avow ourselves merely an assemblage of well-to-do hucksters, who care nothing for what happens beyond. Such a policy would defeat even its own end; for as the nations grow to have ever wider and wider interests, and are brought into closer and closer contact, if we are to hold our own in the struggle for naval and commercial supremacy, we must build up our power without our own borders. We must build the Isthmian canal, and we must grasp the points of vantage, which will enable us to have our say in deciding the destiny of the oceans of the East and West.

He has gone even further. He has thrust aside the plea of non-interference, of cosmopolitan quietism, and preached openly the doctrine which Rudyard Kipling has thrown into verse. Mr. Roosevelt is quite willing to "take up the White Man's burden." He has disclaimed all sympathy with that "mock humanitarianism which would prevent the great free, libertyand order-loving races of the earth from doing their duty in the world's waste places, because there must needs be some rough surgery at first." His general view is that "it is for the interests of mankind to have the higher, supplant the lower, life."

In the first instance, the founders of the new American Imperialism were content with the Spanish islands. The Americans are in the Philippines on

much the same moral title as ourselves in Egypt. They blundered in, under a sudden pressure of events, not very clearly seeing what they were doing, not at all anxious to make a conquest; and, having pushed themselves into the country, and rendered themselves responsible for its future, just as we have done in Egypt, they have to remain; not only that, but they must remain under conditions which will ensure that the Filipinos do not relapse into anarchy or barbarism or mediæval, priest-ridden, stagnation. The group must become an integral part of the modern civilized world. It was one of the weaknesses of the Democrats at the recent election that they would not frankly accept the situation. They fenced with it, in their Convention programme, in a fashion at once maladroit and disingenuous:

as

did

We oppose, as fervently George Washington himself, an indefinite, irresponsible, discretionary and vague absolutism and a policy of colonial exploitation, no matter where or by whom invoked or exercised. Wherever there may exist a people incapable of being governed under American laws, in consonance with the American Constitution, that people ought not to be a part of the American domain. We insist that we ought to do for the Filipinos what we have already done for the Cubans, and it is our duty to make that promise now; and, upon suitable guarantees of protection to citizens of our own and other countries, resident there at the time of our withdrawal, set the Filipino people upon their feet, free and independent, to work out their own destiny.

This passage bears a rather curious resemblance to the woolly declarations of some prominent English Liberals during the first three or four years of our occupation of Egypt. The Policy of Scuttle, as it was sometimes called, was greatly disliked in England,

and it is no more popular in the United States. Sensible Americans know that the assertion of it is both undignified and meaningless. It would be cowardly to run away from the Philippines, and it would also be impossible. If the Democrats came in, they would not be able to "set the Filipino people upon their feet, free and independent," and they could not attempt to do it. The electors wisely preferred a statesman, who does not make these ridiculous pretences, and who regards the possession of the over-sea territories, not as a disagreeable burden, to be dropped as soon as circumstances allow, but as

an

honorable obligation, to be discharged with zeal and fidelity.

But the Imperialist appetite vient en mangeant; the scope of Imperialist activity widens with each fresh accession. There is no help for it, and so the Americans are beginning to understand, with mingled elation and apprehension. They are now a Colonial Power, with special interests in the freedom of the seas, in addition to that of having more cargoes afloat upon it than any other people except ourselves. Therefore anything that interferes with the even flow of maritime commerce touches them closely. The United States is the natural chief and champion of neutral nations in time of war; for its gigantic export and import trade is still to a great extent carried in neutral bottoms. It is not possible for the Americans to survey a conflict on the seas, between two or more of the Naval Powers, with indifference. The Russians entered upon their war against Japan with the tranquil confidence that they would be permitted to practise the kind of nautical highway robbery, more or less recognized in the chaotic muddle of precedents and principles, which is dignified by the name of International Law. They have had to be reminded that this was an error, and to discover that

the "rights" of a belligerent do not include the right to steal and the right to commit assault with violence.

We have done something ourselves, as in the case of the Peterburg and the Smolensk, to enforce the lesson; but we have moved tentatively and timidly, and with an evident desire not to raise fundamental questions. For, to speak plainly, the bullying code which the Russians are trying to apply is largely of our creation; the "Right of Search," with its confiscatory provisions, is very dear to our statesmen. They are still convinced that, if ever we come to a maritime war, we shall continue to be, in the strategic sense, the aggressors; that we shall be able to take the offensive, with the old swaggering superiority; that with our commanding force we shall seal up and blockade all the coasts of our enemy; and that one of our main duties will be to chastise the neutrals who seek to bring him aid and comfort. We suppose ourselves to represent the overwhelming navy that can sweep the seas clear for our own commerce, with little interest in neutrals beyond that of seeing that they do not annoy us or interfere with our operations. Our traditional policy is to vindicate the claims of the maritime belligerent to do very much as he pleases, or as he can. So we have felt a little awkwardness in explaining to Russia that these examinations, and overhaulings, and visitations, and condemnations, though we practised them ourselves industriously in the days of sailing frigates and corvettes, are no longer tolerable.

The opportunity of performing this service to civilized humanity lies with the United States; and it seems that President Roosevelt and his able Secretary of State do not propose to miss it. Mr. Hay's Note, protesting against the Russian seizures of neutral vessels, is in some sense the beginning of an epoch. It is the most vigorous