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new version of the Monroe Doctrine which we failed to realize and whose significance we did not take the trouble to analyze was that it was founded on false premises.

We had assumed a new theorem. In the words of Mr. Olney: "The states of America, South as well as North, by geographical proximity, by natural sympathy, by similarity of Governmental Constitutions, are friends and allies, commercially and politically, of the United States."

A few years earlier, the then Secretary of State, Blaine, had brought into existence the International Union of American Republics, and had enunciated a doctrine of Pan-Americanism which has glowed more or less cheerfully ever since.

Mr. Olney's words recognized this doctrine. But when he gave "geographical proximity" as one of the reasons for this Pan-American alliance, he overlooked the fact that the largest cities of South America are geographically nearer to Spain and Portugal than to New York and New England. He failed to consider that the rich east coast of South America is no more proxi

mate to the southern coast of the United States than to the southern coast of Europe; Key West is no nearer Rio Janeiro and Buenos Aires than is Gibraltar; and so far as the west coast is concerned, it actually takes longer to travel from Valparaiso, the chief South American west coast port, to San Francisco, the chief North American west coast port, than it does to go from Valparaiso to London. Peru is on the Pacific Ocean, but it is as far from Puget Sound as it is from Labrador.

Most of our statesmen studied geography when they were in the grammar school, and have rarely looked at a world-atlas since. In other words, we began the new development of the Monroe Doctrine with a false idea of the geographical basis of the PanAmerican alliance.

Furthermore, the new Monroe Doctrine was established on another false idea, the existence of "natural sympathy" between South and North America. As a matter of fact, instances might easily be multiplied to show that our South American neighbors have far more natural sympathy for, and

regard themselves as much more nearly akin to, the Latin races of Europe, than to the cosmopolitan people of the United States.

A recent visitor, whose ability to make careful and significant observations no one will deny, Mr. James Bryce, in summing up the question of South American affinities, writes as follows: "French literature has a double attraction for the South Americans, including the Brazilians. It gratifies their fondness for graceful and pointed and rhetorical expression. Spaniards, like Frenchmen, love style, and French style has for them a peculiar charm. With a great liking for what they call 'general ideas,' they set less store by an accumulation of facts and an elaborate examination of them than do the Germans and the English, and prefer what may be called the French way of treating a subject. In short, they have an intellectual affinity for France, for the brightness of her ideas, the gaiety of her spirit, the finish of her literary methods, the quality of her senti

ment.

"Then there is Paris. When South Americans began to be rich enough to travel

to Europe and enjoy themselves there, Paris became the Mecca of these pilgrims of pleasure. Many a wealthy Argentine landowner, many a Brazilian coffee planter, every dictator of a Caribbean republic, who, like Guzman Blanco of Venezuela, has drawn from the public revenues funds to invest in European securities, goes to the metropolis of fashion and amusement to spend his fortune there. All the young literary men, all the young artists who can afford the journey, flock thither. There is a large South American colony in Paris, and through it, as well as through books and magazines, the French drama and art, French ideas and tastes, dominate both the fashionable and the intellectual world in the cities of South America. The writers of France have often claimed that there is something in the 'French spirit,' in their way of thinking and their way of expressing thought, which, distinctive of themselves as it is, has, nevertheless, a sort of universality, or an adaptability to the minds of all men, that has more than once in history given it an empire such as no other modern literature has enjoyed.

In and for South America this claim has been made good, for here French influence

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Besides this ever present affinity with France there are also strong bonds of sympathy with the mother countries. These may be readily seen in little things, straws which show the way the currents of feeling are tending.

How the Brazilians feel was seen a few years ago in Rio Janeiro, when Brazil was holding a national exposition. Each state of that great republic had a building of its own, but no foreign nations were represented, except Portugal, the mother country, which had her own building.

How Spain feels was shown recently in the case of a distinguished Spanish professor, who was able to find time to make an extended journey through Latin America, urging Pan-Hispanism, but could find no time to make a lecture tour through the cities of the United States, although offered lavish hospitality and considerable honorariums.

Of the difficulties of establishing any kind

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