understood that it was merely held by a 99 years' lease; and that I did not intend to have another Kiauchau, held by similar tenure, on the approach to the Isthmian Canal. The Ambassador repeated that his government would not agree to arbitrate. I then asked him to inform his government that if no notification for arbitration came within a certain specified number of days"-understood to have been ten days "I should be obliged to order Dewey to take his fleet to the Venezuelan coast and see that the German forces did not take possession of any territory. He expressed very grave concern, and asked me if I realized the serious consequences that would follow such action; consequences so serious to both countries that he dreaded to give them a name. I answered that I had thoroughly counted the cost before I decided on the step, and asked him to look at the map, as a glance would show him that there was no spot in the world where Germany in the event of conflict with the United States would be at a greater disadvantage than in the Caribbean Sea. A few days later the Ambassador came to see me, talked pleasantly on several subjects, and rose to go. I asked him if he had any answer to make from his government to my request, and when he said no, I informed him that in such event it was useless to wait as long as I had intended, and that Dewey would be ordered to sail twenty-four hours in advance of the time I had set. He expressed deep apprehension, and

said that his government would not arbitrate. However, less than twenty-four hours before the time I had appointed for cabling the order to Dewey, the Embassy had notified me that His Imperial Majesty, the German Emperor had directed him to request me to undertake the arbitration myself. I felt, and publicly expressed, great gratification at this outcome, and great appreciation of the course the German government had finally agreed to take. Later I received the consent of the German government to have the arbitration undertaken by The Hague Tribunal and not by me."

A powerful personification of the best and truest Americanism, faithful to the finest and purest of our national traditions, had once more vindicated the moral authority and the republican precepts of the New World. The same Germany which had, on second thought, decided that it was best for von Diederich not to quarrel with Dewey at Manila Bay, again concluded, on second thought, not to challenge Roosevelt and that same Dewey in the Caribbean and in the "Monroe Doctrine's" zone. The flag snapped straighter in the breeze. The shades of Washington and Hamilton must have approved!

"Germany had made the test," says David Y. Thomas in his One Hundred Years of the Monroe Doctrine, "and had found that the Monroe Doctrine was a living reality. Indeed, with a Presi

I P. 214.

dent ready to order warships to the scene of action, it now was decidedly more vital than in 1826, for then Adams, confronted with a politically hostile Senate, was virtually forced to say that it meant only that each nation should maintain the principle in application to its own territory and permit no European power to establish any colonies on its soil.

President Woodrow Wilson's administration, dealing with other vital "Nationalism" fundaments which are reserved for subsequent discussion wrote the most recent chapter in the "Monroe Doctrine's" history-a chapter fraught with frictions, with threatened surrenders, but with ultimate world-wide acknowledgment-the first formal covenant ever thus recorded that the Doctrine is a fixed and permanent tenet in the body of international law. Mr. Wilson's own conception of the Doctrine was ably submitted to Congress in the course of this third annual address, December 7, 1915. Different from Cleveland, he undertook to prove a changing character and a certain mutability in this philosophy, though his conclusions were four-square with tradition. He differentiated between the early days "when the Government of the United States looked upon itself as in some sort the guardian of the Republics to the south of her as against any encroachments or efforts at political control from the other side of the water," and the modern dispen

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* Messages of the Presidents, Vol. XVIII, p. 8102.

sation "when there is no claim of guardianship or thought of wards, but, instead, a full and honorable association as of partners between ourselves and our neighbors, in the interest of all America, north and south." Nevertheless, said he, "our concern for the independence and prosperity of the states of Central and South America is not altered. We retain unabated the spirit that has inspired us throughout the whole life of our government and which was so frankly put into words by President Monroe. We still mean to make a common cause of national independence and of political liberty in America."

Secretary of State Robert Lansing amplified this interpretation in his opening address to the Second Pan-American Scientific Congress on December 27, 1915, when he observed that within recent years the United States "found no occasion with the exception of the Venezuela boundary incident, to remind Europe that the Monroe Doctrine continues unaltered a national policy of this Republic"; suggested that the American Republics, meanwhile, had "attained maturity" on their own account; and intimated that commonality of ideals and aspirations had produced the "international policy of Pan-Americanism" as the ultimate expression of the continuing tradition of 1823. Addressing this same body on January 6, 1916, President Wilson himself continued the amplification. His obvious and rightI Moore's American Diplomacy, p. 268.

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eous purpose was to disabuse South American prejudices and re-disclose the fact that the United States contemplated no untoward super-sovereignty over these Pan-American neighbors; but he did not neglect to say, unequivocally, that "the Monroe Doctrine was proclaimed by the United States on her own authority: it always has been maintained, and always will be maintained upon her own responsibility."

But when the entanglements of the secret cabinets at Versailles, wherein a quartette of paramount cartographers remade the map of the world in connection with the peace that concluded the World War, were disclosed to the American people who had been kept, by a strict censorship, largely in ignorance of the progress of events at Paris-one of the immediate and most intensive scrutinies in vain searched the proposed Covenant of the League of Nations for some specific acknowledgment that the "Monroe Doctrine" had not been sacrificed to the Frankenstein of “internationalism." President Wilson now returned to America for his first homeland contacts and conferences in relation to his European labors and intents. He faced a determined force, in both public and private opinion, which demandedamong many other things to be inventoried later -that the "Monroe Doctrine" must be specifically acknowledged; that the implications of its sovereignty and its tradition must not be even inferentially abridged in favor of an organized