Page:The Pacific Monthly vol. 14.djvu/42

4 mercial rivalry — the United States will have place. We cannot escape the conditions. The actual prize is control or ascendancy in the commerce of the Pacific Ocean.

The movement westward, which began before the earliest written history, and has continued ever since, has now reached a stage upon which the West meets the East, and the East and the West are one. It has come about through extension of the domain of the United States to the shores of the Pacific, through extension of European influence into countries of the Orient and through various movements that have begun the development of commerce on the Pacific Ocean, on a scale large already, and destined to an infinite expansion. Our own interest in the Pacific, which started with the establishment of our cordon of states on this western verge of the continent, has been prodigiously increased and magnified by the acquisition of the Hawaiian and the Philippine Islands. The Spanish War of 1898 opened a door that never will be closed upon us ; and the present struggle between Japan and Russia is one in which we cannot but have deep concern, because it presages a future in which we must of necessity have a very important part. We

cannot escape this participation if we would.

Forces are now in motion which it is clear are to make the Pacific Ocean dur- ing the present century a sphere of ac- tivity similar to what the Atlantic was during the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies, and to what the Mediterranean was twenty or thirty centuries ago. Our own interests are deeply involved in the war between Russia and Japan; for this is but the initial stage of an international strug- gle to be vastly extended, if not with arms, certainlv through rivalries and with the weapons of industry and commerce. On that vast highway which the irony of his- tory has named the "Pacific" Ocean, there is now to be a struggle for commercial and political supremacy as important as any the world has ever seen. We our- selves are literally "in it," and could not retreat if we would. Such a nation as ours cannot play the part of a weakling; we shall not sit down in our back yard and let the world drift by. A nation great as ours must pay the penalty of its great- ness, in effort, money, bother and men.

The conditions will force rivalry between the United States and Russia. For Russia, we take it, though checked b Japan, cannot be forced back, perm a -

Tho California Building, showing two of the four Mission wings.