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CHAPTER IV

"NEW BIRTH OF OUR NEW SOIL"

SOLATION," it has been said, "is not a policy

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but a predicament. The precariousness of the predicament depends upon whether the isolated people are citizens of an island, or a continent. Great Britain boasted of "splendid isolation" while she possessed command of the sea and held in her hands the balance of power; and the United States was content enough with the "isolation" of half the world. The policy, however, becomes a predicament when a people grows too big and the world becomes too small to avoid inevitable contact; and both the expansion of the American people and the contraction of the world, by steam and electricity, prevented isolation from being a permanent possibility.

Nor was "our political hemisphere," as Patrick Henry called it as early as 1788,2 quite so simple an entity as the phrase would seem to imply. It is true American Foreign Policy Association's Pamphlets, 1923-4,

No. 21.

2S. E. Morison, Documents, p. 329.

that wars of independence in the Spanish colonies simplified the hemisphere politically by committing most of it to republican principles. But the insurgent republicans of Central and South America no more remained citizens of the world than did those of the United States; and Bolivar's programme of "America for the Americans" was no prophylactic against wars between Mexico and the United States, or between Chile and Peru. Nationalism in the United States, then in South and Central America, and finally in the Dominion of Canada precluded a Pan-American citizenship of the hemisphere and saved man from the schism of the world. Hemisphericalism was not fated to be a middle term between affection for the nation and affection for mankind.

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The hemispherical doctrine is supposed to be the gospel according to Monroe, and an English schoolboy is said to have described it as the religion of America. But it is doubtful whether that somewhat fortunate President was either capable or desirous of all that has been attributed to his inspira

"The literature on the Monroe Doctrine is immense. For the text of the President's message, see MacDonald, Source-Book, pp. 318-20, and references. I need not repeat here what I said in a lecture (Nov. 1917) printed in History for April, 1919. For a more recent and authoritative exposition of some of its aspects, see Prof. S. E. Morison in Economica (London School of Economics), Jan. 1924, and in Rev. des Sciences Politiques, April, 1924. Cf. also (Sir) Theodore Andrea Cook in the Fortnightly Review, Sept. 1898, and Morton Fullerton in Revue de Paris, 15 April, 1916.

tion or to that of his Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams. The Monroe Doctrine was as dubious in its origin as it is doubtful in its interpretation and disputable in its results. But in spite of the fact that "Congress has never adopted or sanctioned" it "in any way," it is claimed on the one hand to have "always had the entire approval" of the American people; and on the other to be a "worn-out formula." It has clearly served them as well as the no less ambiguous doctrine of the Balance of Power has served the British Empire.5 Eight American statesmen at least, besides Monroe himself, have expounded or expanded the doctrine in various ways and different senses, Presidents Polk, Cleveland, and Wilson and Secretaries Webster, Blaine, Olney, Root, and Hughes. Polk's exposition of Monroe's assertion that "with the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered, and shall not interfere" took the very practical but somewhat startling form of annexing half of Mexico, scheming to get Cuba, and claiming a considerable part of what is now the Dominion of Canada; and Olney's was nearly as remarkable when he announced in his despatch on the Venezuela dis

'J. W. Moore, Congress, pp. 230-2; A. B. Hart, Amer. For. Policy, p. 215. A Tammany orator once described it as "that immortal Monroe Doctrine which blesses and revivifies the world" (ibid. p. 211).

" See my art. in Journal of the Brit. Inst. of International Affairs, II. 51-64.

pute in December, 1895, that "any permanent political union between a European and an American State"-as, for instance, between Great Britain, France, and Holland, and the three parts of Guiana, or between Great Britain and Canada-"is unnatural and inexpedient."

Doctrines, however, have a habit of being stretched to cover all sorts of political conditions and controversial exigencies; and it is more pertinent from the historical point of view to remark that Monroe's presidential message to Congress in December, 1823, was a normal survey of the existing situation and a responsible indication of the attitude of the American government to the immediate questions at issue, couched in language only intelligible by reference to its meaning a century ago. When, for instance, he said that the American continents were not henceforth to be considered as "subjects for future colonization by any European Powers," colonization meant what we should now call exploitation, for even Great Britain had no self-governing Dominions then; it did not mean that Canadians could not move west like other American people. And when he talked about the "Allied Powers" extending their "political system" to either continent, he meant the Holy Alliance, to which Great Britain had never subscribed, and its political system to which Canning was as much opposed as Monroe himself. The Monroe Doctrine was, as Disraeli said A. B. Hart, Amer. For. Policy, p. 222.

It

on 16 June, 1856, "the doctrine of isolation.' was enough for the United States to constitute itself the guardian of independence in America and to make one hemisphere safe for democracy. The Bourbons were not to reconquer the South American colonies, and the Tsar was not to push his despotic dominion southward from Alaska. But these prohibitions would only be tolerable if accompanied by a self-denying ordinance on the part of the United States to abstain from propaganda in Europe and in European colonies.

There is no reason to suppose that Monroe by "hands off America" meant a free hand for American annexation by the United States, though that suspicion soon arose in other parts of the hemisphere; and from the first Pan-American Congress at Panama in 1826 to the latest treaty in 1924, attempts at American co-operation and the objects of the International Bureau of American Republics at Washington have suffered from the predominance of the United States and inconsiderate references to its practical sovereignty. But these obstacles were not

་ Cambridge Hist. of For. Policy, II. 277, quoting Hansard, Debates, CXLII. 1509-13. This, like every other interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine, has been disputed. "It is evident," writes a correspondent of the New York Times (11 Dec. 1924), "as has recently been emphasized by Prof. Pitman Potter, that the Monroe Doctrine is not a policy of isolation."

8 "In South America that sentence of Senator Olney's is on file in every newspaper morgue, and in every statesman's library, and in every public and university library" (For. Policy Assoc. Pamphlets, 1923-4, No. 21). See also J. H. Latané, The United States and Latin America, 1920.