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THE MONROE DOCTRINE

AN INTERPRETATION

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HARVARD COLLEGE

MAR 13 1922
LIBRARY

Set

Copyright, 1916,

BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.

All rights reserved

Norwood Press

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and electrotyped by J. S. Cushing Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
Presswork by S. J. Parkhill & Co., Boston, Mass., U.S.A.

PREFACE

No public policy of the United States has ever taken such hold upon the imagination of the American people as the socalled Monroe Doctrine. It has been quoted, discussed, stated, re-stated, revised, and re-issued for nearly a hundred years. During the last fifteen years the Doctrine has been applied to a much wider range of objects than in its earlier history. The expansion of Pacific relations, the Panama Canal and the Caribbean policy of the United States, have brought it into new complications, requiring new definitions and widening the circle of public interest. Its meaning and its immediate cogency are still uncertain and disputed.

To treat this complex topic in a single volume has been a difficult task, and the author cannot claim to have escaped misapprehensions and contradictions; for the Monroe Doctrine itself is tinged with misapprehensions and abounds in contradictions. To the author's mind the Monroe Doctrine is not a question of theory but of fact. It is founded on the state of things in the Western Hemisphere. It includes much that is not agreeable to the people of the United States, but which must be faced because it exists.

Mean

while, the conditions of the problem change from decade to decade; and any Doctrine which is to endure in the midst of these changing conditions must undergo corresponding alterations.

The volume is divided into seven Parts, of which the first is devoted to the underlying conditions of the new LatinAmerican states who became parties to American Diplomacy; and to the text and the motives for the first official statements. Here and throughout the work quotations have been freely made and they appear in smaller type. Wherever the quotation contains a statement of the theory or

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