countries in the East, and has carried English laws and the English language around the world. But Great Britain at home is an aristocracy. Her Colonies can neither be equal to her nor yet independent. Her subjects in those countries may be free, but they can not be Britons. Consequently, her dependencies are always discontented, and insomuch as they are possessed or swayed by freemen, they are only retained in their connection with the British throne by the presence of military and naval force. You identify an American State or Colony by the absence of the Federal power. Everywhere, on the contrary, you identify a British Colony, whether in British America, or on the Pacific coast, or on its islands, or in Bombay, or in India, or at St. Helena, or at Gibraltar, or on the Ionian isles, by the music of the imperial drum-beat and the frown of royal battlements. Great Britain always inspires fear, and often commands respect, but she has no friends in the wide family of nations. So it has happened that heretofore nations have either repelled, or exhausted, or disgusted the Colonies they planted and the countries they conquered.
The United States, on the contrary, expand by force, not of arms, but of attraction. The native colonist no sooner reaches a new and distant home, whether in a cleft of the Rocky Mountains or on the sea-shore, than he proceeds to found a State in which his natural and inviolate rights shall be secure, and which shall become an equal member of the Federal Union, enjoying its protection and sharing its growing greatness and renown. Adjacent States, though of foreign habits, religion, and descent, especially if they are defenceless, look with favor upon the approach of a power that will leave them in the full enjoyment of the rights of nature, and at the same time that it may absorb them, will spare their corporate existence and individuality. The attraction increases as commerce widens the circle of the national influence.
If these positions seem to require modification at all, the very modifications will, nevertheless, serve to illustrate and sustain the general principles involved. The people of Mexico resist annexation because they fear it would result in their being outnumbered by Americans, and so lead to the restoration of African slavery, which they have abolished. The natives of the Sandwich Islands take alarm
