EXPLANATION OF THE MAP Names and boundaries in red are those of 1823. Brown bars or blocks show former Portuguese territory. Green bars or blocks show French territory in the West Indies and Russian in the North Pacific. Blue bars or stars show territory, claims, or dependencies of the United States. THE MONROE DOCTRINE AN INTERPRETATION PART I THE ORIGINAL MONROE DOCTRINE CHAPTER I THE NEW UNITED STATES 1775-1823 WHAT IS THE MONROE DOCTRINE? No term is more frequent in the literature of American history and international relations, than the Monroe Doctrine: it is conspicuous in school books; it reserves chapters in the most serious works; it forces a place in the reviews; it bursts out in the newspapers; it claims space in Presidents' messages, and in the addresses of public men. No well-regulated newspaper office or cyclopedia could get on without its Monroe Doctrine. To this hard-worked principle might be applied the criticism of Major Jack Downing upon Van Buren - who indeed, both as Senator and as President, had a direct relation with the Doctrine. "Everybody likes him, and he likes everybody, and he is just like everybody -- and yet, in all the droves of folks I've seen - I never saw anybody like Mr. Van Buren." This variety and uncertainty as to what the Monroe Doctrine really is, arises from an attempt to misuse the phrases which were put forward in 1823 for immediate consumption, in order to forestall difficulties then serious but now mostly passed by. These phrases have been made to cover policies and controversies which were not in the minds of the men of 1823: they could not possibly foresee the immense changes in conditions in Europe, in the world at large, and especially in America, which have required new statements of policy. Hence nobody nowadays knows just what is meant by the phrase "Monroe Doctrine", it is a changeable expression, used frequently to electrify current opinions on the relations of the United States with Latin America by dynamic statements made a century ago. There is however a perpetual national policy which needs no authority from President Monroe or any later public man, to make it necessary or valid. It is the daily common-sense recognition of the geographic and political fact that the United States of America is by fact and by right more interested in American affairs, both on the northern and southern continents, than any European power can possibly be. What is called the Monroe Doctrine, in all its varieties and ramifications, is only an attempt to apply this simple principle to changing needs and conditions. Let us call this obvious undeniable principle, which includes the formal statements of ten presidents and twenty secretaries of state, the American Doctrine. Of late the conditions in America have grown very difficult; in the last twenty years new and far-reaching enlargements of policy have been revealed; while the European war of 1914 has disturbed the international organization of the world and introduced a new element of complication into the relations of the American nations between themselves and with foreign countries. These perplexing changes must also be taken into account in the endeavor to state clearly the present meaning and extent of the Monroe Doctrine. ISOLATION OF EUROPE The foundation of the relations of the United States with her neighbors is the physical makeup of the American continent, and its relation to the rest of the world. The bottom stratum of the foundation of the Monroe Doctrine is the isolation of Western Europe from Asia, and the separation of the Western Hemisphere from both Asia and Europe. In these days of exploration, when the six other continents, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Australia and the Antarctic, have been forced at last to yield up the secret of their remotest areas, it is hard to realize the lack of geographic curiosity among ancient and medieval peoples. We moderns feel compelled to follow every stream to its source; to climb every mountain; to follow every furlong of sea-coast; to map all shores and islands. Some of these discoverers have been looking for furs or timber or minerals or gold; most of them have been animated by the sheer love of being the first to set foot upon a spot which hitherto had escaped civilized man. In their track followed the surveyor, the railroad builder, and the settler. To make a new land known is the first step to colonization; before you realize it, a nation grows up in Australia, or New Zealand, or South Africa, where for countless ages there has been only a wilderness supporting savage tribes. The ancestors of the European races had little of this love of discovery for discovery's sake. Therefore, for over two thousand years, down to about A.D. 1500, the round world contained three continents unvisited by Europeans - Australia and the two Americas; and also included two groups of highly civilized people living on adjacent continents, yet almost unknown to each other. If These two groups of civilized peoples, each entirely alien to the other, were apparently kept apart only by military considerations; nobody knew how to carry a conquering army in either direction across southern Asia or across the Indian Ocean. conquest was not possible, neither group felt interested in the civilization and history of the other. The power of Islam, which spread both East and West, somehow failed to become a connecting link: until the voyage of Vasco da Gama to India in 1496, the Orient and the Occident had as little to do with each other as Greenland and Madagascar have to-day. Successive hordes of northern Asia found a way into Europe, but there was no return conquest. Hence there arose a separate European group of states, a European type of community, a European political system. RIVAL INFLUENCES IN AMERICA Both the East and the West failed likewise to make obvious connections by sea. From the Cape Verde Islands to the coast of Brazil is only about two thousand sea miles; from |