LAWS OF NATURE IN CIVILIZATIONS 241
1823, in order to make sure that the current insurrections in the Spanish
American Empire against the Spanish Crown should not end in a re-
establishment of Spanish rule there through the arms and under the
aegis of the Powers of the Holy Alliance. The Monroe Doctrine had
prescribed that American communities which had declared and main-
tained their independence were not to be allowed to fall again under the
control of any European Power; and, since at the time there were no
Great Powers in the Western system of international relations that were
not located in Europe, the Monroe Doctrine had been tantamount to a
declaration that no Great Power was to be allowed to profit by the break-
up of the Spanish Empire in the Americas. It was because the United
States was not yet either able or willing to play the part of a Great Power
in the European cockpit of Western power politics1 that the Great
Powers of the day acquiesced in her purchase, in A.D. 1803, of Louisiana
from France; in her veto, in A.D. 1823, on the entry of any Great Power
into the political vacuum created by the collapse of Spanish rule in the
Americas; and in her annexation of the northern fringe of the former
Spanish dominions in North America, from Texas to California in-
clusive, after waging a victorious war of aggression against the Spanish
Empire's local successor-state, Mexico, in A.D. 1846-7.

A principle thus first established in Western history in respect of the
Americas was promptly applied in the Near and Middle East when, on
the morrow of the General War of A.D. 1792-1815, 'the Eastern Ques-
tion' became interwoven with the older strands of Western diplomacy.
The break-up of the Ottoman Empire, like the break-up of the Spanish
Empire, created a political vacuum that would have been dangerous for
the preservation of peace if the Great Powers had engaged in a scramble
for Ottoman spoils with an eye to a competitive self-aggrandizement;
and, just because this risk of a disturbance of the existing balance might
have been impossible to counteract by any means less drastic than a
resort to war, it was prudently parried by the concerted institution of a
Near Eastern equivalent of the Monroe Doctrine which was none the
less efficacious for not being explicitly enunciated.

The measure of the efEcacity of this tacit Near Eastern Monroe Doc-
trine in practice is given by the contrast between the'respective destinies
of the territories lost by the Ottoman Empire after the year A.D. 1815 on
the one hand and before that date on the other hand. While the Ottoman
Empire's territorial losses between A.D. 1815 and the final d6bacle in
A.D. 1918 were far larger than the losses between the turn of the tide in
Ottoman-Occidental relations in A.D. 1683 and the end of the Western
General War of A.D. 1792-1815, the amount of ex-Ottoman territory that
passed under the sovereignty of Western or Westernizing Great Powers
in the course of the later of these two periods was trifling compared to
the extent of the gains made by the same Powers at Ottoman expense
between A.D. 1683 and A.D. 1815. After A.D. 1815 the only gains made by

1 In the message in which President Monroe warned the Great Powers off the former
Spanish dominions in the Americas, he was careful to assure them, in the same breath,
that the policy of the United States in regard to Europe was one of benevolent non-
interference.