The entry of America into the race for imperial possessions in its last phase was too striking an event to pass without comment.  America annexed Hawaii in 1898, and divided the Samoan group with Germany in 1899.  But her most notable departure from her traditional policy of self-imposed isolation from world-politics came when in 1898 she was drawn by the Cuban question into a war with Spain.  Its result was the disappearance of the last relics of the Spanish Empire in the New World and in the Pacific.  Cuba became an independent republic.  Porto Rico was annexed by America.  In the Pacific the Micronesian possessions of Spain were acquired by Germany.  Germany would fain have annexed also the Philippine Islands.  But America resolved herself to assume the task of organising and governing these rich lands; and in doing so made a grave breach with her traditions.  Her new possession necessarily drew her into closer relations with the problems of the Far East; it gave her also some acquaintance with the difficulty of introducing Western methods among a backward people.  During these years of universal imperialist excitement the spirit of imperialism seemed to have captured America as it had captured the European states; and this was expressed in a new interpretation of the Monroe doctrine, put forth by the Secretary of State during the Venezuela controversy of 1895.  ‘The United States,’ said Mr. Olney, ’is practically sovereign on this continent (meaning both North and South America), ’and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition.’  No such gigantic imperial claim had ever been put forward by any European state; and it constituted an almost defiant challenge to the imperialist powers of Europe.  It may safely be said that this dictum did not represent the settled judgment of the American people.  But it did appear, in the last years of the century, as if the great republic were about to emerge from her self-imposed isolation, and to take her natural part in the task of planting the civilisation of the West throughout the world.  Had she frankly done so, had she made it plain that she recognised the indissoluble unity and the common interests of the whole world, it is possible that her influence might have eased the troubles of the next period, and exercised a deterrent influence upon the forces of disturbance which were working towards the great catastrophe.  But her traditions were too strong; and after the brief imperialist excitement of the ’nineties, she gradually relapsed once more into something like her old attitude of aloofness.

It is but a cursory and superficial view which we have been able to take of this extraordinary quarter of a century, during which almost the whole world was partitioned among a group of mighty empires, and the political and economic unity of the globe was finally and irrefragably established.  Few regions had escaped the direct political control of European powers; and most of these few were insensibly falling