The era of geographical discovery and adventure passes for an era of glorious achievement by men; yet to what end did they care to know and reach the outlying parts of the earth? One motive which led them was the gain of commerce. The products of the Indies could be obtained in no other way, and the trade for them was as old as civilization. The other great motive was to obtain new supplies of gold and silver, under an exaggerated and fallacious notion of the desirableness of those forms of wealth. Starting horn these motives the movement has run its own course of commerce, colonization, war, missionary enterprise, economic expansion, and social evolution for three centuries. The discovery, colonization, and exploitation of the outlying continents have been the most important elements in modern history. We Americans live in one of the great commonwealths which have been created by it. From our local and later, but comparatively old center of civilization, we are hard at work occupying and subduing one of these outlying continents; for in our own history we have been, first, one of the outlying communities which were being exploited, and then ourselves an old civilization exploiting outlying regions.
The process of extension from Europe has gone on with the majesty and necessity of a process of nature. Nothing in human history can compare with it as an unfolding of the drama of human life on earth under the aspects of growth, reaction, destruction, new development, and higher integration. The record shows that the judgments of statesmen and philosophers about this process from its beginning have been a series of errors, and that the policies by which they have sought to control and direct it have only crippled it and interrupted it by war, revolt, and dissension. At the present time the process is going
