in South America are not different from those of other powers, like England and Germany. They are substantially indentical interests; they are all obviously involved together with the improvement of material, political and moral conditions in the South American states.

We have spoken so far as if the Monroe Doctrine had reference only to our relations with European nations. The last thing that any one dreamed of in the days of President Monroe was that the doctrine would ever be brought to bear against an Asiatic power! Japan is the one power which seems to cause certain nervous statesmen and builders of battleships a spasm of anxiety. What if Japan should establish a colony on our continent? Having reached our own hands into Asiatic waters to seize territory against the will of its inhabitants, we are now asked to contemplate the possibility that Japan likewise might reach many thousands of miles after American territory. Calmly considered, however, this seems to be a purely gratuitous cause of apprehension. Those who know Japan best assure us that she harbors no hostile intention against the United States. She is certainly much occupied with costly enterprises at home and in Korea and Manchuria. She has growingly valuable trade relations with us, which tend always to make peace. The worst source of mischief in sight between Japan and us is really what we are doing ourselves by way of making a Gibraltar in Hawaii. What is this but to show fear and suspicion, which in turn excite the like uncivilized passions. Let us even suppose that Japan desired to establish a colony in Mexico or some other state in America. How could she possibly do this, except by the goodwill and agreement of the people by whose side she settled? Does any one imagine that her experience in Formosa has been so cheap and easy as to lead her to seek a hornet's nest on the opposite side of the Pacific Ocean into which to put her hands! But suppose the most unlikely thing, that Mexico or Chile wished the Japanese colony. Can any one show what shadow of right the United States would have to forbid this?

We have sought so far such an interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine as may honorably go in company of the Golden Rule, or, in other words, of international justice. There remains, however, a possible new definition of the doctrine, which should be fairly faced. There is an idea in the air that the United States

holds a certain protectorate or suzerainty over the whole continent of America. A manifest destiny is thought to be working in favor of the dominion or suzerainty of a single power from the Arctic Ocean to Patagonia. Porto Rico is ours. Cuba is almost ours. Many believe that Canada will some time desire to be with us. No people to the south of us shows stable promise of what we call good government. The new canal at Panama affords additional reasons for our control of the continent. Boundless resources are yet to be developed in the virgin continent. We are the people who can provide the brains, the capital and the political security requisite for the exploitation of practically a seventh of the surface of the earth.

The new Monroe Doctrine comes thus to mean, frankly, that we want, or at least may some time want, all America for ourselves. We give due notice in advance of our claim of preemption. What else does the Monroe Doctrine mean, that there should be the pretense of a necessity to fight for it? What else did President Roosevelt mean by his note of repeated warning to the republics of South and Central America that they must "behave themselves"? Here and nowhere else looms up the need of new battleships and a hundred millions of dollars a year for the navy. It is in regard to South America, and for the extension of the Monroe Doctrine to a control over the continent, that we discover in the political horizon all manner of colossal foreign responsibilities and the possibilities of friction and

war.

The new Monroe Doctrine may kindle the imagination and stir the ambition of thoughtless people; it may tempt some of them with a glamour of power and wealth. We may fancy that we would like to be the suzerain power on the continent, with United States officials in authority in every Spanish and Portuguese American capital. The stern ancient question presses: What right has the United States to assume a protectorate, and much less any form of sovereignty, over South America? The South American governments are as independent as our own; they are growing more stable and less revolutionary every year. There are no traditions common between us to constitute us an acknowledged Lord Protector over them. On the contrary, our conduct toward Colombia and the Philippines, and the extra.ordinary utterances of some of our public men seem to have

already produced a certain nervousness among our SpanishAmerican neighbors who naturally resent our patronage.

Neither does international law, which has never in the past given the Monroe Doctrine any clearly acknowledged footing, admit the right of the United States to mark off the American continent as its own preserve, and to stand, like a dog in the manger, to warn other friendly peoples from entering it. In short, so far as we are good friends of the South American peoples, so far as we are friends of our own kinsmen over the seas on the continent of Europe, so far as we desire permanent amicable relations with the people of Japan, so far as our intentions in South America are honestly humane and philanthropic, we have no need whatever of the Monroe Doctrine any longer. On the side of our common humanity all our interests are substantially identical. On the other hand, so far as we purpose to exploit the continent for our own selfish interests, so far as we aim at the extension of our power, so far as we purpose to force our forms of civilization and our government upon peoples whom we deem our "inferiors," our new Monroe Doctrine rests upon no grounds of justice or right, it has no place with the Golden Rule, it is not synonymous with human freedom: it depends upon might, and it doubtless tends to provoke jealousy, if not hostility and war.

Atlantic Monthly. III: 721-34. June, 1913

Monroe Doctrine: An Obsolete Shibboleth. Hiram Bingham

Of the difficulties of establishing any kind of an alliance between ourselves and the South American Republics no one who has traveled in South America can be ignorant. As has been well said by a recent Peruvian writer: "Essential points of difference separate the two Americas-differences of language, and therefore of spirit; the difference between Spanish Catholicism and the multiform Protestantism of the Anglo-Saxons; between the Yankee individualism and the omnipotence of the state natural to the South. In their origin, as in their race, we find fundamental antagonisms. The evolution of the north is slow and obedient to the lessons of time, to the influences of custom;

the history of the southern peoples is full of revolution, rich with dreams of an unattainable perfection."

One of the things which make it, and will continue to make it, difficult for us to treat fairly with our southern neighbors is our racial prejudice against the half-breed. As Señor Calderon bluntly says, "Half-breeds and their descendants govern the Latin-American Republics"; and it is a well-known fact that this leads to contempt on the part of the average Anglo-Saxon. Such a state of affairs shows the difficulty of assuming that Pan-Americanism is axiomatic, and of basing the logical growth of the Monroe Doctrine on "natural sympathy."

In the third place, the new form of the Monroe Doctrine declared, in the words of Secretary Olney, that the "United States is practically sovereign on this continent." This at once aroused the antagonism and the fear of those very southern neighbors who, in another sentence, he had endeavored to prove were "friends and allies, commercially, and politically, of the United States."

Less than three years after the enunciation of the new Monroe Doctrine we were at war with Spain. The progress of the war in Cuba and the Spanish colonies was followed in South America with the keenest interest. How profoundly it would have surprised the great American public to realize that while we were spending blood and treasure to secure the independence of another American republic, our neighbors in Buenos Aires were indulging in the most severe and caustic criticism of our motives! This attitude can be appreciated only by those who have compared the cartoons published week after week during the progress of the war in this country and in Argentina. In the one, Uncle Sam is pictured as a benevolent giant saving the poor maid Cuba from the jaws of the ferocious dragon, Gen. Weyler, and his cruel mistress in Spain. In the other, Uncle Sam, in the guise of a fat hog, is engaged in besmirching the fair garments of the Queen of Spain in his violent efforts to gobble up her few American possessions. Representations of our actions in the Philippines are in such disgusting form that it would not be desirable to attempt to describe some of the Argentine cartoons touching upon that subject.

Our neighbors felt that a decided change had come over the Monroe Doctrine! In 1823 we had declared that "with the ex

isting colonies or dependencies of any European Power we have not interfered, and shall not interfere" (so runs the original Monroe Doctrine). In 1898 we not only interfered, but actually took away all of Spain's colonies and dependencies, freeing Cuba and retaining for ourselves Porto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.

Without for a moment wishing to enter into a discussion of the wisdom of our actions, I desire to emphasize the tremendous difference between the old and the new Monroe Doctrine. This is not a case of theories and arguments, but of deeds. What are the facts?

In 1895 we declare that we are practically sovereign on this continent; in 1898 we take a rich American island from a European Power; and in 1903 we go through the form of preventing a South American Republic from subduing a revolution in one of her distant provinces, and eventually take a strip of that province because we believe we owe it to the world to build the Panama Canal. Again, let it be clear that I am not interested at this point in defending or attacking our actions in any of these cases-I merely desire to state what has happened and to show some of the fruits of the new Monroe Doctrine. "By their fruits ye shall know them."

Another one of the "fruits" which has not escaped the attention of our neighbors in South America is our intervention in Santo Domingo, which, although it may be an excellent thing for the people of that island, has undoubtedly interfered with their right to do as they please with their own money.

Furthermore, within the past three years we have twice landed troops in Central America and taken an active part by way of interfering in local politics. We believed that the conditions were so bad as to justify us in carrying out the new Monroe Doctrine by aiding one side in a local revolution.

Of our armed intervention in Cuba it is scarcely necessary to speak, except to refer in passing to the newspaper story, credited and believed in Cuba, that if American troops are again obliged to intervene in the political life of that country they will not be withdrawn, as has been the practice in the past.

The menace of intervention, armed intervention, the threatened presence of machine guns and American marines have repeatedly been used by Latin-American politicians in their endeavors to keep the peace in their own countries. And we have