our commerce was very extensively enlarging its foreign fields without big fleets and without colonies, by its own peaceful action. We simply produced, in our factories as well as on our farms, more things that other nations wanted, and we could offer them at prices with which other nations could not compete. This golden key of industrial progress and peaceful commercial methods opened to our trade many doors which seemed to be closed against it by all sorts of artificial obstructions; and this peaceful expansion of our foreign commerce went steadily on, while other nations that had an overabundance of battalions, batteries and warships vainly struggled to keep pace with it. These are facts, undenied and undeniable.
But what will happen to us, commercially, if other nations seek by force to monopolize certain fields of trade for themselves, and in the course of that effort come to blows with one another? Then a sober and circumspect calculation of the advantages to be gained, and of the price they would cost, will probably lead to the conclusion that in such a case a strong neutral Power would enjoy very favorable opportunities and in the end have the best of the bargain. And when I speak of a strong neutral Power, I do not mean a neutral Power so fully armed that it might at once successfully cope with any of the belligerents, but I mean a neutral Power strong enough in its resources and in its position to make each belligerent extremely anxious to abstain from anything that might drive it to the other side. Such a neutral Power this Republic was not, in its infant state, during the Napoleonic wars preceding our war of 1812, when both belligerents, France as well as England, thought they could kick and cuff this Republic with impunity; but such a strong neutral Power this Republic, with its seventy-five millions of people and its immense wealth,
