and the financial integrity of the Latin-American republics. But the performance of this duty seemed to negate our professions of disinterestedness. Every intervention of the United States to influence elections, dictate candidates, enforce conventions, and suppress uprisings lent weight to the argument of those Latin-American politicians and publicists who were determined to see nothing but a cynical policy of aggression in our behavior. The stable and prosperous states of South America, like Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay, were inclined to sympathize with the tropical republics in their protests against "Yankee Imperialism." For example, Dr. Ingenieros, one of the most noted authors of Argentina, wrote in October, 1922: "The famous Monroe Doctrine, which appeared for a century to be our guarantee of political independence against European conquest, has revealed itself gradually as a right of the North Americans to intervene in our affairs. The powerful neighbor and officious friend has developed to the highest extent the régime of capitalistic protection and has reached in the last war the hegemony of the world. . . . In the governing class there has grown at the same time a sentiment of expansion and conquest [!], so that the classical phrase 'America for the Americans' means now nothing more than America-our Latin America for the North Americans. . . . The danger of the United States comes from her superiority. She is to be feared because she is great, rich, and strenuous.'

Our government has been sincerely anxious to allay such fears. In an address at Philadelphia in November, 1923, in celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine, Secretary Hughes said: "In promoting stability [in Latin America] we do not threaten independence, but seek to conserve it. We are not aiming at control, but endeavoring to establish self-control. . . . We are seeking to establish a pax Americana, maintained not by arms but by mutual respect and good will and the tranquillizing processes of reason." Still, the complaint of Latin America is that we insist on being both judge and jury in the case. When Uruguay, at the fifth Pan-American Congress at Santiago de Chile, in the spring of 1923, proposed that

the Monroe Doctrine be "pan-Americanized," our representative, Henry P. Fletcher, interposed an immediate veto. The Monroe Doctrine "must be exclusively interpreted and exercised by the United States." This prerogative we insisted on having reserved to the United States in the covenant of the League of Nations; and though we are not (1924) a member of the League, that body has deferred to our authority in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere by refusing to entertain appeals from Bolivia and Panama against our rulings in boundary disputes.

The necessity for a broad, enlightened, and conciliatory statesmanship in our relation to the Central American and South American republics has been emphasized by the events of the last decade. In the first place, the economic growth of many of these countries has been marvelous. The result of the war has been to divert to the United States a good part of the trade which they formerly had carried on with the European nations. Mr. S. G. Inman, the executive secretary of the Committee on Coöperation in Latin America, writes: "The old idea in the United States was that Latin America, being so largely made up of Indians and illiterates, offered little opportunity for commerce. Business men are gradually wakening to the great error of such an opinion. Little Cuba, with a 2,500,000 population, had a foreign commerce in 1920 about equal to that of China, with a 400,000,000 population. Argentina alone did about $2,000,000,000 of foreign trade in the year closed June 30, 1920. In spite of the revolution in Mexico the United States sold more farm implements to that country in 1920 than it did to France in the midst of reconstruction work. All the millions of Asia and Oceania bought less from the United States last year than did Latin America. Our foreign commerce with the whole world was $13,000,000,000 in 1920. It would have been $75,000,000,000 if the business we did with Latin America had been maintained in the rest of the world." In

1"Obstacles to Pan-American Concord," Times Current History, February, 1923, p. 791. Our investments in Latin-American industries and public securities now (1924) total nearly $4,000,000,000, or about $35 per capita for our population of 112,000,000; and our trade with Latin America is almost $2,000,000,000.

the second place, the war and the peace gave to the LatinAmerican countries for the first time a political status commensurate with their economic importance. Their delegates have held high positions in the League of Nations, and in the absence of the United States they have been the "American" representatives. Again, the overthrow of the autocracies of the Old World in the war seemed to the Latin-American republics to remove any further necessity for the Monroe Doctrine as a guaranty of their independence against European intervention and to leave that doctrine as an instrument of aggression in the hands of the United States. The Latin-American countries are now partners with Europe; they are no longer willing to be mere wards of the United States.1

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The advantages and opportunities, as well as the responsibilities, which confront the United States today in the LatinAmerican countries are far different from what they were in the days of Blaine and Bayard, but the American people have as yet hardly begun to comprehend the change. When they do, they will realize what far-reaching issues depend upon the establishment in those countries of a generous confidence in the doctrine of "disinterested friendship" and the equalitarian partnership of the United States.

THE STRUGGLE FOR NEUTRALITY

Never perhaps in history has the Persian doctrine of the powers of Light and Darkness locked in eternal conflict for the mastery of the world seemed better justified than in the second decade of the twentieth century. And never has the irony of history shown itself more pathetically than in the confidence manifested at the beginning of that decade in the near triumph of the power of Light. In spite of the fact that Europe was an armed camp; that the great nations whose policies governed

1 Cuba, Panama, Brazil, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, and Nicaragua declared war on Germany between April, 1917, and May, 1918. Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Santo Domingo, and Uruguay severed diplomatic relations. Argentina was barely held by her president to a position of protesting neutrality.

its destinies were grouped in mutually hostile alliances and ententes in the vain attempt to preserve a "balance of power"; that their boundaries were bristling with forts and their people staggering under the burden of military and naval armaments; that the Balkans were a tinder box that had twice blazed into flames, which had been confined to their borders only by the heroic efforts of the European diplomatists; that Slav and Teuton were bitter rivals for the control of southeastern Europe; that the French and English had closed the door of Northwestern Africa in the face of the Kaiser, whose officers were drinking toasts to "the Day" (der Tag) when they should wrest the control of the seas from Great Britain and secure for Germany her rightful "place in the sun,"-the optimistic view that the world was approaching the era of universal peace was gaining ground year by year. International societies for social, scientific, economic, educational, financial coöperation were being multiplied. World-peace organizations were flourishing. Arbitration was hailed as the new solvent for international disputes. War was branded as atavistic barbarism by the apostles of "the international mind," condemned as "inconclusive mass murder" by the pacifists, and ridiculed as "suicidal folly" by the economists. Closely bound together by the ties of commerce and credit, the civilized nations of the world could only injure themselves by destroying their neighbors. All must go up or down together. War only wasted common wealth. It did not "pay."

Yet with a strange infatuation the nations clung to the hoary lie that to be armed to the teeth is the surest way of preserving peace. The Kaiser, who walked in "shining armor" and rattled the sword in the scabbard, posed as an "apostle of peace" and was even praised as such. That he gave his first and last thoughts, by his own confession, to perfecting a military machine which should be irresistible when he should set it in motion seemed to be less significant than that he had not yet seen fit to launch that machine against any of his neighbors. At the very moment when the drum roll was drowning the voices of the diplomatists, who were frantically striving to avert war, Presi

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dent Poincaré of the French Republic was reviewing the troops of Czar Nicholas at St. Petersburg, to the strains of the "Marseillaise," and congratulating his host that the exhibition was a guaranty of the peace of Europe ("la paix assurée"). Lord Haldane, Lord Chief Justice of England, had returned from a mission to Berlin in 1912 with the announcement that the "indications were that there was a far better prospect of peace than ever before." The British cabinet was assuring the people who were inclined to be nervous that there was "nothing to fear." Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said, “This is the most favorable moment in twenty years to overhaul [reduce] our expenditures on armament."2

It is hardly surprising, when European statesmen could so deceive themselves that a temple of peace was being built upon the shaky foundations of alliances and ententes, that we in America, separated by the broad ocean and the long habit of political isolation from Europe's hates and fears, should have indulged the welcome delusion that all the labors for international good will were at last about to bear fruit. "Many happy manifestations," said President Wilson in his first annual message to Congress, "multiply about us of a growing cordiality and sense of community among nations, foreshadowing an age of settled peace and good will. More and more readily each decade do nations manifest the willingness to bind themselves by solemn treaty to the processes of peace, of frankness and fair concession." He referred with pride to the "assent in principle of no less than thirty-one nations representing four fifths of the population of the world" to Secretary Bryan's proposed treaties of arbitration, which bound the signatory nations to submit "all questions of whatever character and nature in dispute between them" to the investigation of an international commission, in case diplomatic negotiations failed, and to re

1 Poincaré had said in his presidential message to the French Chambers in February, 1913, "Our words of peace and humanity will be the more likely to be heeded if we are known to be more determined and better armed."

2 Yet in a speech at Cardiff, Wales, on August 2, 1914, Premier Asquith owned that the cabinet had known for two years that "Germany was preparing for a war of conquest to overthrow and dominate the European world."