"Nat, Rivier, Feb 193" A.T. Mahan

the United States, it is clear that for them to contract relations of dependence upon a European Power involves the United States at once in a net of secondary relations to the same Power potential of very serious result. Why acquiesce in such? But the fundamental relations of international law, essential to the intercourse of nations, are not hereby contradicted. National rights, which are summed up in the word independence, have as their correlative national responsibility. Not to invade the rights of an American state is to the United States an obligation with the force of law; to permit no European State to infringe them is a matter of policy; but as she will not acquiesce in any assault upon their independence or territorial integrity, so she will not countenance by her support any shirking of their international responsibility. Neither will she undertake to compel them to observe their international obligations to others than herself. To do so, which has been by some most inconsequently argued a necessary corollary of the Monroe Doctrine, would encroach on the very independence which that political dogma defends; for to assume the responsibility which derives from independence, and can only be transferred by its surrender, would be to assert a quasi suzerainty. The United States is inevitably the preponderant American power; but she does not aspire to be paramount. She does not find the true complement of the Monroe Doctrine in an undefined control over American states, exercised by her, and denied to Europe. Its correlative, as forcibly urged by John Quincy Adams at the time of formulation, and since explicitly adopted by the national consciousness, is abstention from interference in questions territorially European. These I conceive embrace not only Europe proper, but regions also in which propinquity and continuity, or long recognised occupancy, give Europe a priority of interest and influence, resembling that which the Monroe policy asserts for America in the American continents and islands. In my apprehension, Europe, construed by the Doctrine, would include Africa, with the Levant and India, and the countries between them. It would not include Japan, China, nor the Pacific generally. The United States might for very excellent reasons abstain from action in any of these last named quarters, in any particular instance; but the deterrent cause would not be the Monroe Doctrine in legitimate deduction.

Harper's Weekly. 50: 1738-9. December 8, 1906

Evolution of the Monroe Doctrine

Professor John Bassett Moore has rendered a great service to students of American history by his Digest of International Law, as this is embodied in diplomatic discussions, treaties, and other international agreements, international awards, the decisions of municipal courts, and the writings of jurists. This work, which has just been completed in eight volumes, may be regarded as practically exhaustive. There is no subject connected with the international relations of the United States with regard to which it may not be consulted with profit. It is to what Mr. Moore has to tell us about the Monroe Doctrine that we would direct attention at this time, inasmuch as the Santo Domingo Treaty is coming up for ratification at the approaching session of Congress, and inasmuch as the Pan-American Conference at Rio de Janeiro decided to interrogate the next Hague Congress as to whether it should be deemed permissible to enforce by violence the payment of contractual debts. To the Monroe Doctrine more than two hundred pages of Mr. Moore's sixth volume are devoted. By a series of quotations he shows that the germ of the Monroe Doctrine existed long before it was formulated by the fifth President. For example, as early as 1793, Jefferson, then Secretary of State, warned our ministers at Madrid not to bind us by any treaty clause to guarantee to Spain any of her American colonies against the success of its struggle for independence, or even against attack by any other nation. In 1801, Rufus King, then minister to England, told Lord Hawkesbury that we should be content to let the Floridas remain in the hands of Spain, but should not be willing to see them transferred, except to ourselves. In 1808 President Jefferson wrote to Governor Claiborne of Louisiana: "We should be well satisfied to see Cuba and Mexico remain in their present dependence, but very unwilling to see them in that of either France or England, politically or commercially. We consider their interests and ours as the same, and that the object of both must be to exclude all European influence from this hemisphere." In 1811, Congress, replying to a secret message from President Madison, resolved in secret session that the United States could not, without serious inquietude, see any part of the territory adjoining the

southern border of the United States pass into the hands of any foreign power, but that "a due regard to their own safety compelled them to provide, under certain contingencies, for the temporary occupation of the said territory."

Nothing could be more clear than the foreshadowing of the Monroe Doctrine in a letter addressed by Jefferson to William Short on August 4, 1820. The writer dwelt on the advantages of a cordial fraternization among all the American nations, and the importance of their coalescing in an American system of policy totally independent of and unconnected with that of Europe. Less than three years later, in April, 1823, J. Q. Adams, Secretary of State, writing to Mr. Nelson, minister to Spain, declared that the rumored intention of Spain to transfer Cuba to Great Britain would, if carried out, prove unpropitious to the interests of our Union. He did not hesitate to assert that the commanding position of that island with reference to the Gulf of Mexico and the West India seas, the nature of its productions and of its wants, furnishing the supplies and needing the returns of a commerce immensely profitable and mutually beneficial, gave it an importance in the sum of our national interests with which that of no other foreign territory could be compared, and little inferior to that which bound the different members of our Union together.

It was in August, 1823, that George Canning, British Secretary, sent to Mr. Rush, American minister at London, a private confidential memorandum, in which he said that England aimed not at the possession of any part of Spanish America, but could not see with indifference any section of it transferred to any other power. This memorandum was forthwith transmitted to J. Q. Adams, Secretary of State, and was, by President Monroe, forwarded to ex-Presidents Jefferson and Madison. Monroe's own impression was at the time, he said, that we ought to view any interference on the part of the European Powers with the New World, and especially an attack on the South-American colonies by them, as an attack on ourselves, presuming that, if they succeeded with them, they would extend their aggression to us. Sensible, however, of the breadth and difficulty of the question, he desired counsel of his two predecessors. Jefferson, in a reply dated October 24, 1823, said that he could honestly join in the proposed declaration that we did not aim at the acquisition

of any Spanish-American possessions, and would not stand in the way of any amicable arrangement between them and their mother country; but that we would oppose, with all our means, the forcible interposition of any other power under any form or pretext, and most especially their transfer to any power by conquest, cession, or acquisition in any other way. Madison concurred with Jefferson. On November 15, J. Q. Adams stated in his diary that President Monroe had shown him the letters from Jefferson and Madison, and that "Calhoun is perfectly moonstruck by the surrender of Cadiz, and says the Holy Allies, with ten thousand men, will restore all Mexico and all South America to Spanish dominion." With these data before us, we can understand how Monroe came to put forth his famous message on December 2, 1823, in which he declared that while with the existing colonies or dependencies of any European Power we had not interfered, and should not interfere, yet "with the governments who had declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have on great consideration and on just principles acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European Power, in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition towards the United States."

So much for the gradual genesis of the Monroe Doctrine during the thirty years following the first indication of it by Jefferson in 1793. Let us pass to some of the more significant cases in which it has been applied. Toward the close of 1827 the Argentine Republic, being at war with the empire of Brazil, addressed to Henry Clay, then Secretary of State, an inquiry as to the scope of the declarations contained in President Monroe's message of December 22, 1823. Clay replied that the war raging between the Argentine Republic and the empire of Brazil could not be conceived as presenting a state of things bearing the remotest analogy to the case which Monroe's message had deprecated. "It is," continued Clay, "a war strictly American in its origin and its objects. It is a war in which European allies have taken no part." Even if Portugal and the Brazils had remained united, and the war had been carried on by their joint arms against the Argentine Republic, that, Clay thought, would have been far from presenting the case which the message con

templated. Interesting, too, is the case of Yucatan, where, an Indian outbreak having occurred in the forties, the authorities offered to transfer the dominion and sovereignty to the United States, and, at the same time, made a similar offer to Great Britain and Spain. With reference to this offer, President Polk said, in a special message to Congress, that while it was not his purpose to recommend the adoption of any measure with a view to the acquisition of the dominion and sovereignty over Yucatan, yet, according to our established policy, we could not consent to a transfer of this dominion and sovereignty to either Spain, Great Britain, or any other European Power.

As early as October, 1858, reports came from Europe that a naval and military armament was about to leave Spain destined to attack Mexico, with a view to acquiring political ascendency there. Lewis Cass, then Secretary of State, in a letter to our minister at Madrid, pointed out that, with respect to the causes of war between Spain and Mexico the United States had no concern and did not undertake to judge them. Neither should we claim to interpose in any hostilities which might take place. Our policy of observation and interference would be limited to protection against the permanent subjugation of any portion of the territory of Mexico or of any other American state by any European Power whatever. Two years later, Cass, in a letter to our minister in Paris, declared that the United States did not call in question the right of France to compel the government of Mexico, by force, if necessary, to do it justice, but that the permanent occupation of any part of the territory of Mexico by a foreign power, or an attempt in any manner forcibly to interfere in its internal concerns or to control its political destiny, would give great dissatisfaction to the United States. It is well known that, in spite of this warning, Napoleon III, taking advantage of our absorption in a civil war, undertook, by force, to establish in Mexico an empire under an Austrian archduke. No sooner was the Union restored, however, than General Sheridan was sent with an army of about fifty thousand men to the line of the Rio Grande, and another army was organized for the purpose of acting against the French army in Mexico in case of need. About the same time, Seward, Secretary of State, notified the French Minister for Foreign Affairs that whenever might have been the purposes of France when she sent an army