This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1901 edition. Excerpt: ...nation to the world." We had just shaken off the shackles of a control exercised not in the broad spirit of England's modern colonial methods, but in the narrow self-seeking of a desire to use the colonies for the benefit of the crown. It was the blunder of a dull King and an unwise Minister. It has been repudiated and given over long ago. So much so, that to-day, we are to learn from Great Britain the lesson of the management of colonies, because she has learned the lesson that we taught her about their mismanagement. We were then what the old Latin writer called the Britains, "orbe remotos." Only the slightest and most infrequent possibilities of communication shut us off from even the knowledge of passing events, until they had passed into forgetfulness in the country where they occurred. And we were absorbed in the tremendous task of building up the broken and scattered fragments of a disjointed congeries of states, into a nation. There was no time, no need, no possibility of our touching, or troubling ourselves with the politics or policies of European states; much as they threatened then to trouble us. And the caution, when Washington uttered it, was wise and true. But it is like arming a soldiery now with flintlocks and blunderbusses, like recurring to transportation with mules and by canal-boats, like the employment of the Indian runner instead of the telegraph, to quote, as applicable to our changed conditions, cautions and counsels which belong to a long past time. We are entangled in alliances to-day with the whole habitable globe, by a network of wire flashing under the oceans and around the world, with a speed that not only annihilates distance, but carries its messages to the remotest East, hours before the...