Thus did fate compel a virtual acknowledgment from the sticklers
for individual rights, within four years after their accession to
national control, that the Constitution did not follow in all its
provisions the extension of sovereignty over new soil.
From a broad point of view, the placing of sixty years of territorial
expansion in the hands of the party opposed to the practice by birth
and nature is a strong evidence of the checks and balances which have
made the nation. Under strict construction, territorial expansion
became a potent factor in loosening the bonds in which the Government
might have been confined. Under loose construction, expansion might
have become a centrifugal force through foreign conquest and colonial
holding which would have destroyed the free system it was intended to
build up. The Jeffersonians were moved in later expansions by a desire
to extend an economic system and to make party capital. They never
sought national aggrandisement, as their opponents might have done had
they been in power. Proud of the territorial growth of the Union as
we now are, and seeing so clearly the wisdom of the final consummation,
we forget that the domain might have been increased too rapidly or too
extensively in more sympathetic hands.
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