Britain, and Spain resorted to reprisals against Mexico without protest. Later, when France (Great Britain and Spain having withdrawn) essayed to set up and maintain a monarchy in Mexico, the United States protested and eventually brought the attempt to an end. The war between Spain and the republics on the west coast of South America has heretofore been mentioned. In 1894 Great Britain seized the port of Corinto, in Nicaragua, to collect an indemnity. In 1903 Germany, Great Britain, and Italy blockaded the ports of Venezuela, with the acquiescence of the United States, it being expressly understood that there should be no permanent occupation or acquisition of Venezuelan territory. These incidents are recalled not for the purpose of advocating or justifying the employment of force in any particular instance, or of intimating that the United States is not justified in exhibiting special concern in regard to what may tend to jeopardize the independence of states for whose preservation it has assumed a contingent responsibility. They are cited only for the purpose of demonstrating that the Monroe Doctrine has not been understood to involve the denial by the United States to other American nations of the primary rights and liabilities of independent states.

The establishment of the relations between independent American states on the basis of mutual confidence, respect, and co-operation is, as has been seen, an aspiration long cherished by generous minds.

But, although this aspiration forms the central thought of Pan Americanism, it is not easily realized. On the contrary, its realization is a highly difficult task beset with complicated problems and intricate obstructions. Nor will the time ever come when it will not afford ample opportunity for the exercise of an informed and discriminating judgment, of welldirected and intelligent helpfulness, and of consideration for the opinions and feelings of others, to say nothing of the reciprocal recognition of rights and occasional forbearance. These qualities, so vital to the preservation of amity and confidence elsewhere, are no less essential in the Western Hemisphere.

References:

Reports of the four International American Conferences, and particularly the Historical Appendix (Vol. IV) to the report of the first conference; the works of Bolivar; Henry Clay and Pan Americanism, Columbia University Quarterly, Sept., 1915; Latané's Diplomatic Relations of the United States and Spanish America.

The relations between the United States and the other American countries are comprehensively presented in Moore's Digest of International Law.

XI

INFLUENCE AND TENDENCIES

NOTHING Could have been further from the thoughts of the wise statesmen who guided the United States through the struggle for independence and laid the foundations of the government's foreign policy than the institution of a philosophical propagandism for the dissemination of political principles of a certain type in foreign lands. Although the Declaration of Independence loudly proclaimed the theory of the natural rights of man, they gave to this theory, in its application to their own concerns, a qualified interpretation, and, as practical men, forbore to push it at once to all its logical consequences. On the continent of Europe, the apostles of reform, directing their shafts against absolutism and class privileges, spoke in terms of philosophical idealism, while the patriots of America, though they did not eschew philosophy, debated concrete questions of constitutional law and commonplace problems of taxation. In Europe, the revolution meant first of all a destructive upheaval; in America, where the ground was clear, it meant a constructive de

velopment. And yet, in spite of this difference, the American Revolution operated as a powerful stimulus to political agitation in Europe. There was in the very existence of American independence, permeated as it was with democratic republicanism, a force that exerted a world-wide influence in behalf of political liberty. Of this fact European statesmen betrayed their appreciation when they deprecated the course of the King of France in subordinating what appeared to them to be a permanent general interest to the gratification of a feeling of enmity towards Great Britain. Spanish diplomatists were not alone in expressing this sentiment. The Emperor Joseph II. of Austria, in a letter to his minister in the Netherlands, in 1787, remarked that "France, by the assistance which she afforded to the Americans, gave birth to reflections on freedom." That the assistance thus given hastened her own revolution, there can be no doubt. Nor did the visible effect of the example of the United States end here. It has been manifest in every European struggle for more liberal forms of government during the past hundred years—in Spain, in Italy, in Germany, and in Hungary. It penetrated even to Russia, where there was found among the papers of one of the leaders who planned a revolution for 1826 a constitution for that country on the model of the Constitution of the United States. And it And it may also be traced in the lives of those who have striven to

advance, sometimes under adverse and discouraging conditions, the cause of self-government on the American continents.

While the United States refrained from aggressive political propagandism, the spirit of liberty that resulted from its independence was necessarily reflected in its diplomacy. It is true that the attitude of the government on certain special questions was for a long while affected by the survival in the United States of the institution of African slavery. It was for this reason that the recognition of Hayti, Santo Domingo, and Liberia as independent states did not take place till the administration of Abraham Lincoln, although such recognition had long before been accorded by European powers. But the attitude of the United States towards those countries was exceptional, and was governed by forces which neither diverted nor sought to divert the government from the general support of the principles on which it was founded.

The influence of the United States in behalf of political liberty was clearly exhibited in the establishment of the principle, to which we have heretofore adverted, that the true test of a government's right to exist, and to be recognized by other governments, is the fact of its existence as the exponent of the popular will. This rule, when it was announced, appeared to be little short of revolutionary, since it was in effect a corollary of the affirmation made in