entangling alliances;" their irresponsibility for the moral effect of their own words; their reckless contempt for foreign Powers, who are not on their own scale of prosperity or population, has been a bad training-school of diplomacy. And at home the same spirit is witnessed in the popular indifference to purity and effectiveness in official administration. As we shall see in another chapter, the idea of a trained service of strict business methods, and the absence of personal or party favouritism in the administration of government, is only in embryo in America.

If America is to be a world-power, it is obvious that she must exercise her powers as these are exercised by other nations.

She must, as one of her citizens advises, "wheel into line, and follow the droit commun, the common law of all civilized peoples." The day of experiments in general government is past; let America reserve her ingenuity for legislation. She must acquiesce in the jus gentium, or law of nations.

Naturally after the Chinese episode all Europe was anxious to see America continue her international policy so auspiciously begun. They seek to egg on to Quixotic feats of arms in which she would surely be out of her element. Look at this strain from the redoubtable M. Urbain Gohier. He wants America to interfere in Turkey, and as he declaims every Chancellerie in Europe shrieks with ribald laughter.

"The American Navy is powerful, while a Turkish Navy scarcely exists. Where is the possibility of war? There must be two to make a fight. To show the blood-stained Sultan a few battle-ships, and warn him that every human head that

falls with the knives of his assassins will be paid for by the destruction of one of his palaces, this would not be the work of a conqueror, but the action of a noble heart.

For the great American Nation the rush would be nil, the cost insignificant, and the glory infinite. It would show that its prodigious material wealth has not stifled its feeling of chivalry; it would," etc.

Come on, America; come on, and mingle with us, fight with us, sink with us. Our caudal appendages have been incontinently severed; say, why should yours wag pendant?

Mr. Hay, as we have just seen, was ill-advised enough to take up the challenge.

Imperialism will inevitably demand that Congress shall support the policy of the Executive, and the latter must possess large powers of initiative. Otherwise it would be impossible to maintain the secrecy and reserve frequently indispensable to diplomatic success. Lack of continuity in America's foreign policy must place her at a disadvantage when dealing with other Powers whose diplomacy suffers no such arbitrary breaks.

The goal towards which the Expansionists are leading America is the Cabinet system of Government, which is inevitable for the country if she is to have wide-spread international relations.

But although American diplomacy is operative under great difficulties, there are now many Americans who are piously ready to cry, "Better a thousand times the perils of intimacy with other nations, and with the race at large, than the perils of isolation or of detachment from the race at large."

CHAPTER VII

THE MONROE POLICY

HAVING displayed Mr. Hay and his well-meant struggles to establish the New Diplomacy, let us now turn to a grave inconsistency in America's foreign relations which, if persisted in, threatens danger to the republic.

The Continent of Europe has a deep cause of offence against America in her dog-in-the-manger policy towards South America.

They see from afar a vast continent, thinly peopled, suitable to Europeans, full of natural resources, in short, one of the prizes of colonization in the world, which America coolly announces she will neither occupy herself nor let anybody else occupy.

Now, Germany is already a powerful physical factor in Brazil, and would like political paramountcy; Italy, whose sons are already settled in vast numbers in Argentina, casts longing eyes on that country; France desires ardently the control of Guiana; Austria-Hungary wishes Uraguay. Not for selfish purposes; not in order to press the yoke of tyranny upon the necks of the people, but in order to find an outlet for their surplus population and energies, in obedience to that normal twentieth-century law of which I have spoken.

Is it, then, surprising that certain statesmen should

have adumbrated the league of Europe against America a necessity of civilization"? 1

as "

The Monroe policy was a preventive measure designed to ward off the thrust of the Holy Alliance, which seemed to threaten the political existence of America. Monroe and his advisers saw the danger from afar, as did the British minister Canning, but it was the latter alone who suggested the policy.

The world moves, and the world ages. The Western Hemisphere of 1903 is not as it appeared to Canning and Monroe in 1824. The "republics" of Spanish origin grow more unlike the rest of the nations, more unlike each other.

In the first place, although the Latin republics of the Western Hemisphere have taken America as their model, the peculiar qualities inherent in the people prevent them from following the spirit of Anglo-Saxon laws and theory of government.

In half a century Mexico has had eight Constitutions, twenty revolutions, and fifty pronunciamentos. She has had a succession of petty tyrants, under the names of emperor or president, who have arrogated supreme authority by means of force, and each has in turn been overthrown by force. If to-day the Mexicans seem to enjoy a period of tranquillity it is by reason of their prudent concession to a dictatorship, however it be veiled under Constitutional forms.

As for the other five republics of Southern North

1 Long ago, Bismarck, instead of seeing in the Great Republic the halocrowned pioneer of liberty and progress, could see in it only an "incendiary republic of evil repute—where a brutal and hypocritical democracy has the lead, where the venality of officials, the fraudulent appropriation of public money, and the terrors of lynch law are the order of the day!"

America, they are periodically subject to revolts and mutinies, and are without any secure foundation.

In fact, with the exception of Brazil and Chili, all the Latin nations of the Western Hemisphere have exhibited profound political incapacity. In Colombia, tyrannies succeed tyrannies as constitution follows constitution. Force and violence seem to be in the blood of the body politic. In Venezuela, the pronunciamento of the victorious upstart is the only method of obtaining power, and has grown to be a veritable, and almost venerable, institution of State. As for Ecuador, it has been called "a fragment of the Europe of the Middle Ages," secluded between the Pacific and the summits of the Andes, "an immense monastery with the honours of a nation." This is no longer its plight, but the advance has not been very marked. Within the past quarter of a century, a foreign war has robbed Peru of her two richest provinces, and more than ten civil wars have helped to bring her to her present state of bankruptcy.

In brief, the Spanish colonies in both North America and South America had not at the time of their revolt from Spain been educated for liberty and self-government, but rather for dependency and servitude.

If Germany were to invade and conquer Argentina, America would not be menaced any more than if Germany were to conquer Greece or Portugal. Argentina is 5000 miles from Washington.

It is probably a fact that the Kaiser views with secret and strong approbation the plans for securing a German colony in the South American continent. The only obstacle in his way-for we would hardly be so