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AMERICA'S ENTRY INTO THE WAR

AMERICA AND BRITAIN

BY

ANDREW CUNNINGHAM McLAUGHLIN

A.M., LL.D., F.R.Hist!s.

Head of the Department of History, Chicago University. Author of
"A History of the American Nation," ''The Con-
federation and the Constitution,"
etc.

NEW YORK

E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY

681 FIFTH AVENUE

Copyright, 1919,
BT E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY

All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America

PEEFACE

Of the papers here printed, four were orig-
inally given as lectures at the University of
London in May, 1918. The first was also given,
with some slight modifications and additions, to
a number of audiences in the United Kingdom,
generally under University or College auspices.
The fifth paper was read before the Royal His-
torical Society and has already been printed
in the American Political Science Review. I
have consented to the publication of the lectures
with some misgivings, my chief reason for hesi-
tation being an appreciation of the fact that
lectures are not essays; they are prepared to
be spoken and, if put into print, may w^ell ap-
pear quite difiFerent in tone and temper and
even character. Especially is this likely to
be the case when lectures are thought to be
adapted to a special occasion and a particular
audience.

It is, however, too late to repent the decision
to print, and they are here presented with the
hope that they may be of some slight service
in helping to strengthen the good feeling and

388333

vi PEEFACE

sense of comradeship between the British and
the American people.

As an admirer of Great Britain, I have felt
free to speak quite openly and have not allowed
myself merely to indulge in pleasantries and
oratorical adulation. I have referred without
reserve to the prejudices and misunderstand-
ings of the past, which we hope are now laid
definitely aside, and I have not shrunk from
giving my own opinion of Britain's errors. If
I seem to dwell on them too much, it is because
I have desired not to give the appearance of
avoiding disagreeable truths or what, at least,
I deem to be truths. It is a privilege to speak
in a frank and friendly way to a tolerant and
kindly people.

The article called the ^^ Background of
American Federalism" may be of interest at
the present time when so many persons in Brit-
ain are discussing federalism, and if correct in
its analysis of the disputes of the American
Revolution — as I am confident after many years
of study it is — it discloses, not only that the
old British Empire is the source of the central
principle of federalism, but also that the politi-
cal problem now holding the attention of Brit-
ish students and men of affairs is in its es-
sence of very long standing.

In various places, I mention what I believe

PREFACE vii

to be the wholesome and beneficent effect of
liberalism. It is doubtless unnecessary to say
that I have no party principles in mind and no
party differences. I mean only those general
sentiments and convictions and that faith and
confidence in the rights and character of the
main body of the people, which constitute the
foundation of the British and American poli-
tical structures, and which, lived up to with
some considerable conscientiousness in domestic
politics, have necessarily affected imperial ad-
ministration and policy and also created a point
of view and a fixed principle of guidance for
dealing with the perplexities of international re-
lationships and responsibilities.

I must acknowledge my great indebtedness to
The Monroe Doctrine: an Interpretation, by
Professor A. B. Hart. The careful collection
of excerpts from state papers and the writings
of American statesmen was of considerable
service to me in the preparation of the lecture
on the Monroe Doctrine.

Andrew C. McLaughlin.

Chicago, September, 1918.

CONTENTS

PAGE

America's Entry into the War .... 1

British and American Relations. Part I . 37

British and American Relations. Part II 67

The Monroe Doctrine 97

The Background of American Federalism . 177

IZ

TO THE MEMORY OF

Captain Rowland H. McLaughlin

Who gave his Life for the Principles
OF Justice and Honor among Nations

At the Meuse
october the fourteenth

nineteen HUNDRED AND EIGHTEEN

AMERICA AND BRITAIN

I now see that more than patriotism is necessary.

Edith Cavell.

You cannot be truly free, unless we are free too ; for such is
the nature of things, that he, who entrenches on the liberty of
others, is the first to lose his own and become a slave.

John Milton, in The Second Defence of the People of Eng-
land, addressing Cromwell.

(We may invert the above declaration of Milton and say:
We cannot be truly free, unless you are free too; for such is
the nature of things, that he, who loses his own liberty, is the
first to entrench on the liberty of others.

The message of the Allies to Germany.)

The destruction of Old England would hurt me. I wish it
well; it afforded my ancestors an asylum from persecution.

John Jay to Gouvemeur Morris, 1778.

"It is a remembrance of mine, now hard to realize, that I
was brought up to abhor the memory of George III. ' ' At this
she smiled and answered, "That was very unjust, for I was
brought up to adore the memory of George Washington. ' '

Conversation between Andrew D. White and the Empress
Frederick, the daughter of Queen Victoria and the great-grand-
daughter of George III. Reported in the Autobiography of
Andrew D. White.

> » » • •

r •'% -

AMEEICA^S ENTRY INTO THE WAR: AN
HISTORICAL STATEMENT '

An audience of intelligent and well-read Brit-
ish people is well aware of the fact that America
long held aloof from the complications of Euro-
pean politics, but it is not altogether easy to
comprehend how remote were the diplomatic
controversies of this side of the ocean. Even
the intellectual classes discussed such questions
seldom, and when the subject was discussed the
matter appeared distant and devoid of inmae-
diate interest; it was impersonal and bookish.
Only those that had traveled in Europe had
much notion of the tension existing on the Con-
tinent, and only keen observers discovered that,
for it was not to be seen on a hurried holiday
trip through the art galleries of the Old World.
We had little or no knowledge of the ever-
vexed Balkans, and had cyclopaedic ignorance
of the Eastern question. Individually we may
have had our sympathies and our mild antip-

*A lecture delivered at University College, London, on May
7tli, 1918, with the Rt. Hon. A. J. Balfour in the chair.

1

2 AMEBICA AND BRITAIN

athies, but as a people we were unsuspicious,
guileless, and unsophisticated. Some of these
attributes may appear to be inapplicable, for
you may know that in Governmental matters
we have sometimes been sharp, perhaps I should
say aggressive, but, on the whole, as a people
we live in an air of toleration.

I trust that the Italian historian was in part
wrong when he contrasted Europe with Amer-
ica, saying that Europe was clouded with hate
and America brightened by friendliness; but
I am confident that we as a nation were free
from mean suspicions and lived in an atmos-
phere of good nature. This good nature is not
necessarily temperamental. We are not good-
natured now — we are ugly. Our good-natured-
ness was in large measure the product of igno-
rance, of absorption in our own affairs, and of
intense interest in the game of business, in the
task of social betterment, and in political con-
troversy. Foreign affairs touched us only
slightly. Moreover, we were a composite peo-
ple, priding ourselves on our capacity to ac-
cept and to make our own the peoples of many
nations. We watched, those of us that had in-
tellectual interest in national development, the
steady stream of immigrants pouring into the
land, and though we often had misgivings we

AMERICA IN THE WAR 3

were generally carried along by characteristic
optimism, and by a wholesome faith in the
power of American ideals to make over the new-
comers into citizens feeling and thinking as the
rest of us did. Prejudices and dislikes and sus-
picions of alien peoples were, therefore, for-
eign to us ; we did not reason about it, or pon-
der the problem particularly, we simply moved
along unaware of danger and without feeling.
Many of you will say to yourselves : * ^ Much of
this is also true of Britain ; we have not nursed
hatred or encouraged suspicion of other na-
tions; we, too, have been friendly and open-
minded.'* If you are saying so, you are doubt-
less speaking the truth. Certainly in America
we were quite unprepared for an appreciation
of the psychology of Germany, for any under-
standing of that mean jealousy, the petty and
gross intolerance, the suspicions and sly in-
trigue which we have at last come to know so
well.

For a hundred years and more America has
been free from the entanglements of European
politics. We appeared to have but one principle
of foreign politics, and that was to mind our
own business and to let Europe alone. Occa-
sionally we were reminded that America had
become a world-power, but most of us smiled

4 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

at the expression, thinking we had been a world-
power for a century or more, and not believing
that we were called upon to abandon our old
policy of isolation or be caught up in the tan-
gled skein of Europe. We had one fixed pol-
icy, the Monroe Doctrine, which meant what
it might mean — for it was a perfect chameleon
among doctrines — ^but, conveniently adaptable
to exigencies of international affairs in the
Western hemisphere, it was rigid in its applica-
tion to Europe. America, for her own safety,
for her own interest, was to lead her own life,
and follow her own courses. This policy, if
policy it may be called, for it is, after all, rather
a feeling, a sentiment, and a tradition than a
policy, may appear to you narrow and provin-
cial, the child of selfishness and of ignorance.
Well, I am not here to defend or apologize; I
can only say that conditions are much as I
have described them ; and, again, you may pos-
sibly say that you, too, in the care of your vast
Empire, would have been quite content to be
left alone ; you would have been more than satis-
fied, most of you, if you could have believed
that you could go on quite freely to do your best
with your own problems without fear of mo-
lestation or interference from some jealous
outsider.

AMERICA IN THE WAR 5

The Monroe Doctrine is defended by prao-
tically all American students of history for
what it has accomplished, but, right or wrong,
it was popularly held and supported; it is prac-
tically the only policy of State which we have
ever had, and which through the whole of our
national existence has maintained itself and
strangely persisted despite the developments of
modern history, despite the fact that the ocean
had become a highway and not a barrier, de-
spite the strength of commercial and intellec-
tual bonds connecting us with Europe, despite
the growth of democracy over here and the ex-
tension of those principles of popular govern-
ment which at one time we justly thought were
our peculiar possession. But deeper, more far-
reaching than a policy of State embalmed in
a phrase was the strength of tradition, our one
tradition, and deeper still a sentiment, a feel-
ing, an attitude of mind, a sense that we were
to move along fulfilling as best we might our
own destiny, and carrying our burdens as stead-
ily as our own strength permitted.

To-day America is stirred as it never has
been before; not even in the days of our own
Civil War, I think, was feeling more intense or
thought more bitter. We know that America
has been called to its own, called to give proof

6 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

on the field of battle that it values honor and
liberty and truth and fair dealing more than
life. We are not ignobly striving for profit or
territorial aggrandizement; we have no hidden
purpose in our detestation of the forces which
have plunged the world into the misery of un-
speakable sorrow and desolation. But this I
must say — and I believe I speak truthfully and
with some slight knowledge — ^you and I should
err if we did not see how difficult it was to reach
the conviction that a European struggle was
ours also ; how difficult, how extremely difficult,
to uproot those habits of thought which I be-
lieve I have not described too strongly. No one
can be sure how thoroughly hereafter we shall
participate in world affairs. I know not what
to say, or how to express the contradictory im-
pressions that come to me. I am confident of
intense earnestness, of a profound feeling of
duty, of pride in the leadership of a great
American, whose vision is wide and whose love
of humanity is strong. I am confident of deep
and vivid sympathy for the unhappy Belgians
to whom we have given food and care and
money. We have admiration for brave, sor-
row-stricken France and for the quiet, master-
ful strength of Britain, by whose side we gladly
fight. But I cannot be sure that we have alto-

AMERICA IN THE WAR 7

gether cast aside old supports or barriers, or
that we have reached a stage where we can think
internationally. It may be, we do not know,
it may be that the old days of isolation are
gone ; it may be that we are henceforth to play
a conspicuous role in the affairs of the world.
To me that appears inevitable. Isolation con-
flicts mth realities of modern life too strongly,
our duty is too clear, your hopes for civilization
and peace are too nearly identical with ours,
the world is too nearly one organic whole, the
needs of humanity are too pressing to allow a
nation like America to live its own life heed-
less and unmindful of responsibility for affairs
beyond its borders; and so we may expect in-
telligent and, I hope, high-minded and gener-
ous participation of America in world affairs;
but no one can be sure just how thoroughly we
have cast aside our old habits.

From describing the American attitude to-
wards foreign affairs before the war I have
passed on to a consideration of the present and
the future, for already the past seems long past,
and the present holds us in its grasp. I must
endeavor, however, for the time, at least, to
keep my mind within those early trying and
soul-harrowing years when we were amazed,
distracted, doubtful, full of newly awakened in-

8 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

terest and newly aroused foreboding, stirred
with sympathy and with hitherto unfelt pas-
sions, groping amid new scenes, learning new
enmities, finding that we were in the presence
of a dark, unseemly force that most of us had
not dreamed of, holding fast, over-stubbornly,
it may be, but holding still to what we were or
had been, believing or trying to believe, or
struggling out of the belief, that this war was
not our war, turning over in our minds the re-
sponsibility involved in calling 100,000,000
peaceful people to arms, obtaining ourselves
or hoping that the man on the street was get-
ting a wider outlook on the whole world wherein
he might see that patriotism is not enough — see
narrow-souled patriotism exalting its own Kul-
tur and beating down the life and hope of a
wider humanity. From what I have already
said it will be plain that a mental change and
a sentimental change had to come before this
wider outlook could be had; knowledge had to
be gathered and new interests had to be cre-
ated.

If I have been rightly informed, British no-
tions of the American population are in danger
of falling into one of two opposite errors. On
the one side is the belief that we are a British
people who a hundred years or more ago broke

AMERICA IN THE WAR 9

away from Britain, and are still in all essen-
tials British to the core. On the other side is
the belief that British stock has been entirely
submerged and that the land is filled with a
myriad of men of different races but slightly
affected bv the culture and mental habits of
the Mother Country. No one can with perfect
precision describe the American people, cer-
tainly not in a few words, but it can be said
with considerable positiveness that we are
neither one thing nor the other. Even of the
eighteenth century it could truthfully be said
that not England but Europe was the Mother
of America. The flood of emigrants that have
come in the past fifty years in constantly in-
creasing numbers has filled our land with mil-
lions of persons whose traditions are not Brit-
ish. A considerable portion of these persons
have become Americanized, their children have
learned the English language, and have been
absorbed into our life. In 1910 the foreign
white stock amounted to about one-third of the
total population, 32,000,000 people. By foreign
white stock I mean persons born in Europe or
the children of foreign born. Of these 8,000,000
were German, though these figures do not in-
clude Austrian Germans; 2,500,000 were Ger-
man born. In recent years there has been an

10 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

influx of Russians, mostly Russian Jews, and
also many Italians, with not a few Greeks. How
far had these people, even those that had been
in the land a decade or two, been actually ab-
sorbed? I cannot answer, but there are one
or two things I can say with some assurance.
Most of these people were proud of American
citizenship, most of them felt that they had cast
the past aside, many of them showed an appre-
ciation for the elemental ideals of American
life. And this leads me to a consideration of
the other belief that some of you may hold, that
this flood has submerged the old British stock.
Here, again, the whole truth is illusive, but the
main outstanding fact is, in my judgment, the
astonishing vigor of Anglo-Saxon life. Noth-
ing is to me, as I study American history and
American conditions, more impressive than the
force of the essentials of Anglo-American civil-
ization. The influences of language, of litera-
ture, of law have exerted and will continue to
exert steady pressure, and the resulting civil-
ization will be largely identical with your own.
After all, there is something compelling in the
principles of individual liberty, in those prin-
ciples of political thought and action which
America inherited from Britain.
We have no conscious desire to counteract the

AMERICA IN THE WAR 11

qualities brought to our shores by the men from
the European Continent. When in the past we
have spoken of the immigration problem, and
realized the difficulties, we have not said : ^ ' Can
these people be inoculated with the qualities of
Anglo-Saxonism, can they be brought under the
sway of the old British stock!'* We have said:
^^Can we be sure that these people will become
American, patriotic, and law-abiding! Will
they accept what, even in these latter days, w^e
call the ideals of American citizenship!'* And
it must be remembered that one of those ideals
was hospitality, opportunity for the man of the
Old World to start over again on our shores,
and to go on and up with us. We have had no
desire, and we have now no desire, to influence
these people to any fixed standards of racial
life.

I am discussing this subject only to show you
certain elementary factors in a complicated
situation. My intention is not to impugn the
patriotism or the civic virtues of the recent im-
migrants ; but it must be plain that among them
sympathy for Britain would play no part, there
would be no instinctive response to the needs of
any foreign country, save the one or the other
with which they were racially connected, and
perhaps not with that. Many of these persons

12 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

left the Old World to escape its military bur-
dens. My object, let me repeat, is not to com-
plain of the attitude of these millions, nor, on
the other hand, to praise or defend them. To
me the striking fact is this, that the vast ma-
jority were prepared, when the time came, to
follow the flag of the United States, quietly to
take up the load of war, and to walk forward
with no other thought than patriotic devotion
to the country of their adoption and the prin-
ciples which they knew you as well as we were
fighting for.

There is one other thought which I must of-
fer, a simple one, but of real significance. The
war was far away. I have emphasized our de-
tachment and our seclusion from the political
affairs of Europe, but I am speaking now only
of the difficulty with which incidents are made
real by the imagination, if those incidents are
three or four thousand miles distant. You will
say, perchance, that distance did not cloud the
mind of the Australian or the South African.
All the more honor to them. But, again, and
I speak solely of facts as I see them, it was hard,
very hard, for the average man in a prairie
town of the Mississippi Valley to feel the ac-
tuality of the stories told him in his weekly
paper. Such men as I have in mind are not un-

AMERICA IN THE WAR 13

intelligent, they are not hopelessly narrow and
dull. But they did not instinctively realize that
this was their war. The reason will be given
by any tyro in psychology: the war lacked im-
mediateness.

If any considerable portion of what I have
said is true, then time was necessary to awaken
new ideas and to get new points of view. Pas-
sions, I know, for which there has been emo-
tional preparation, can quickly sweep across the
Continent, but, while we are a sensitive people,
and react quickly to certain elements, it is just
impossible for a wave of impulse to pass from
one side of the land to the other, unless by our
previous history the brain-tracts have been de-
veloped through thought and experience. Of
course, that is true of all peoples. The Ger-
mans flew to arms, flung themselves into war,
because their minds had been dwelling on war,
and because of the psychological effects of mili-
tarism. But America was in its essence a coun-
try of peace; men's minds needed to be
wrenched from their moorings, or shunted on
to new lines altogether, before they could even
conceive of the barbarity of war.

Our population also lacked homogeneity, and
you cannot by a single spark send a fiie of pas-
sion through 100,000,000 men not in psychologi-

14 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

cal contact. Plainly, then, the American people
required time to learn, time to become homo-
geneous in their attitude towards the great
question of the war. I am not contending
that we ought not to have gone to war earlier;
I am trying to be detached, unargumentative.

If you still ask why the common man did not
more quickly grasp the complexities of the Eu-
ropean conflict, I ask you in turn to let your
mind wander from New York, with its million
of foreign-born citizens, its great wealth, and
its vast material splendor, prosperity, and pov-
erty, onward across the Continent, over the
Appalachians, across the prairies dotted with
innumerable farmhouses and villages and popu-
lous to^vns, onwards to California and the Pa-
cific, three thousand miles away, or down
through the cotton-raising South and up to the
wheat regions of Minnesota and the Dakotas,
then over the iron and copper regions of Michi-
gan. Face the difficulty of actually reproducing
in your own mind the conditions of life, the
spirit and the temper of that vast region, and
if you do, you will appreciate the task we had
in visualizing Europe, and you will possibly be
astonished, as I sometimes am, not that we
moved slowly, but that finally, little by little,
step by step, we came to feel as a nation and

AMERICA IN THE WAR 15

as a single whole to see the thing in all its naked
and vulgar ugliness, this thing with which we
had to fight, in defense of civilization, and the
elementary principles of decency and manly jus-
tice.

What were the American sympathies in the
earlier months of the war? You can probably
answer that yourselves. In many quarters
there was intuition and instantaneous sympathy
for the Allied cause. Many of us, ignorant as
we were, had learned something of German mili-
tary ambition. Some of us had knowledge of
German arrogance. Some of us realized that
a War Lord reigned in Berlin, and we had long
believed that his great military establishment
menaced the peace of Europe. Such persons re-
acted to the side of Britain and France almost
at the very beginning — strongly, as soon as they
saw the facts — but I venture to say that if there
was hesitation in reaching definite conclusions
no one who has read the history of modern
diplomacy will altogether blame the hesitant.
But soon came the British Blue Book, with the
dispatches of your Foreign Office ; the thing we
wanted to know was: Who began this war?
We wanted to know authoritatively, documen-
tarily, unequivocally — and we found out. We
discovered the truth we were seeking, in part

16 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

from the British Blue Book ; and its revelations
were considerately confirmed by the German
White Book. This German volume is the most
important document of the war ; a revelation of
military arrogance, of haughty intolerance. It
was convincing even more by what it omitted
than by what it contained ; for if the old adage
was ever true it was true of this particular
volume. The suppression of the truth is the
confession of falsehood.

What I am now saying must appear to you
like lines from ancient history, and for that
matter so does it to me. But I need to recall
for historical accuracy the painful interest with
which we turned the leaves of the Blue and
White and Gray Books as they came to hand,
and how those of us having access to their pages
were enlightened in our sympathies and steeled
in our repugnance to the methods of autocratic
militarism. The story of the scrap of paper
set America to thinking hard. Never did the
carrying power of a phrase more clearly mani-
fest itself. Then for some months we studied
and discussed the invasion of Belgium, and be-
gan to gather in the tales of German atrocities,
at first with incredulity, but with steadily grow-
ing amazement and indignation. Doubtless you
passed through the same mental experiences

AMERICA IN THE WAR 17

yourselves. Can one be ashamed of his unwil-
lingness to believe that a nation calling itself
civilized could be guilty of the cruelty practised
by the German Army in Belgium? In our case,
as perhaps in yours, it was only after the pub-
lication of the Bryce Report with the accom-
panying documents that we saw the reality and
believed the unbelievable. We discovered, then,
what militarism meant in its final qualities —
militarism which inculcated devastation and
terrorism as a portion of definite military pol-
icy. Belgium settled the sympathies of the
great mass of the people of America. We saw
the whole horrible thing was premeditated,
planned with cold, calculating, repulsive Ger-
man efiiciency. We realized that mobilization
plans are not formed in a moment, or strategic
railways laid down in a night ; we realized that
RealpolitiJc — the very word a reproach — in-
cluded deceit as well as barbarity. Even in
these days of misgiving and distress we may
take some comfort possibly in believing that in-
ternational bullying, MacJitpolitik, was shat-
tered when it shocked the conscience of the
world. John Bright, I believe it was, said that
the only value of war is to teach geography;
but this war taught a language. We learned
what SchrecMicJikeit means ; and we discovered

18 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

that terrorism is involved in the whole philoso-
phy of war when it is carried out with relent-
less thoroughness and with logical disregard for
the ordinary promptings of compassion.

German propagandists early began to culti-
vate American opinion. I do not know what
effect missionaries of Kultur like Herr Dern-
burg made on the popular mind. On the whole
I imagine Herr Dernburg himself believes to-
day that he did more harm than good. Cer-
tainly more harm if he succeeded in arousing
the passion and increasing the prejudices of
German- Americans, and certainly harm for the
German cause if he awakened resentment in the
hearts of such simple-minded Americans as were
aware of his purposes. The great body of the
American people were not hoodwinked by the
German propagandists. A famous American
said early in the war that he had been asked
by British friends whether it would be well to
send material to America to win the people to
the cause of the Allies, and he replied: *^I do
not think it is at all necessary, the American
people at large have a good deal of sense, when
all is said, and, if their good sense fails, the
German Ambassador will help them to appre-
ciate the rectitude of the Allied position.''

The attempts of German propagandists to

AMERICA IN THE WAR 19

justify the invasion showed an astonishing in-
ability or unwillingness to make frank use of
public documentary material. Documents found
in the Belgian archives showed that some years
ago an English military officer and a Belgian
official had consulted together as to what steps
England should take in case Germany invaded
Belgium. After Germany had done the very
thing which England and Belgium had feared,
German propagandists tried to justify her by
declaring that Belgium was considering means
of preventing it. The use made of the docu-
ments actually affronted our intelligence and
added to our distrust.

You are about to ask me why America did
not plunge into the war or immediately prepare
for the conflict, just as soon as the enormity of
Prussian deceit and cruelty was realized.
Again, I cannot tell you, and again I refrain
from speaking apologetically or in condemna-
tion. I can only say that a very few, a very
limited number, in my judgment, believed by
the early spring of 1915 that this war was our
war in the sense that we should enter. After
all, did a nation ever before in the world's his-
tory enter a conflict only because it loathed
the principles and despised the conduct of an-
other nation, solely because of moral indigna-

20 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

tion, or have nations been led into war by min-
isters or rulers, or for some evident material
gain? My historical information may be insuf-
ficient, but, as I see it, the nearest approach to
such altruistic conduct was when you yourselves
entered this war and sent over your famous
little army to win imperishable glory and to die
on the field of honor at Mons. Pray do not
accuse me of dealing in smart retort. You are
no stronger defender of British honor, cour-
age, and high-mindedness than I am. I claim
at such a time as this and in this presence no
indulgence as an ignorant outsider. But am I
not right in thinking that your interests in some
respects coincided or appeared to coincide with
duty and your honor? If you answer no, that
you offered all for humanity, I shall not deny
you. I am not wrong, however, I think, in at-
tributing to Mr. Balfour himself the remark,
when we did enter the war, that it was the most
magnanimous and generous act in history.

May I give one more answer to why we did
not enter the war as soon as Machtpolitik was
revealed in all its hideousness — an answer, I
mean, not already suggested by the earlier por-
tions of my remarks in which I attempted to
portray American psychological condition?
The answer is this : a great many persons were

AMERICA IN THE WAR 21

strengthened in their antipathy to war. In-
stead of making men more warlike the struggle
in Europe made them more determined to keep
the peace. We clung to an ideal not totally fool-
ish, though time proved it to be vain. We be-
lieved that the stricken world might actually
be benefited if one great nation should keep out
of the struggle. We thought, not stupidly,
though wrongly, that the spectacle of a nation's
standing almost unarmed and totally unafraid
might be of some service in ushering in the day
of peace and of reconciliation.

Of one thing I can speak with much con-
fidence— and in such a complicated matter it is
comforting to have one sure piece of solid
ground to stand upon — the financial gain from
neutrality entered into our calculations not w^ith
the weight of a farthing. Profits from muni-
tion-making or from trade influenced the gen-
eral sense of the country not one iota. At no
time did we measure our duty or our interest in
dollars and cents or scan with mean avidity
the pages of our ledgers. Occasionally, it is
true, one heard of the advantages offered by
the war for increasing our trade with South
A'merica; but here again in no appreciable de-
gree did this enter into our calculations or sear
our consciences.

22 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

Shall I say a word about the Lusitania, about
that shameful, premeditated, advertised, and
dastardly crime? It is difficult even now to
speak about it with calmness, and there is no
reason why one should. You know, of course,
of President Wilson's messages, and you know
that here and in America as well there was
some sharp criticism because he did not follow
his words with immediate and energetic action.
There are many to-day who believe that, if he
had then spoken the word, America would have
sprung to arms, that the masses of the people
were waiting for the word. Well, who can tell?
I think myself that even then, in the spring of
1915, the people were not ready. Some believed,
or strove to believe, that we had no right to
furnish munitions to the Allies ; many had not
yet fully realized the enormity of Germany's
criminality. Only, I repeat, only by a partial
understanding of the America I have sought
to describe to you can one see the difficulty of
arousing the people to war. America is a demo-
cratic country ; the people do not blindly follow
leadership or accept opinions from others. If
the President had taken a false step, he would
have lost his powers of guidance, and, more-
over, though many were bitter and all were un-
happy, the masses of sensible, sober people, un-

AMERICA IN THE WAR 23

learned in matters of international law, did not
readily see how totally illegal and totally bru-
tal was the attack on unotf ending travelers and
noncombatants. Moreover — and here is the
most crucial but more illusive and intangible
thing — the nation, in its very reluctance to act,
in its readiness to wait, in its willingness to ac-
cept at^ront and injury, showed certain quali-
ties of intelligent patience, a certain obstinate
love of peace, a certain over-indulgence in the
desire to be fair-minded. It was one of those
maddening and inhibiting contradictions such as
illuminate and darken the course of history —
idealism and rectitude of purpose standing in
some measure in their own light.

All through those years we hoped, as probably
the President did, that we could save the shat-
tered fabric of international law by protest and
expostulation. That appeared the chiefest duty
of a neutral nation ; that duty might justify the
retention of neutrality even when we ourselves
were suffering injury at the hands of the bel-
ligerents. That duty possibly justified even our
complaints of the British blockade, which, I
think it must be confessed, constituted at least
an unexpected expansion of the legal privileges
of a belligerent. Of course, as we now see,
words could have no effect on a German Gov-

24 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

ernment bent on beating down all opposition
and on setting up its appetite as the central
principle of international law ; but I cannot help
thinking there was at least some evidence of
character and considerable right-mindedness in
our hope that argument and stern rebuke would
save something from the wreckage.

After the Sussex affair, in the summer of
1916, our relations with the German Govern-
ment were again greatly strained, but President
Wilson succeeded in getting a promise that mer-
chantmen should not be sunk without warning
and without saving lives, unless the vessel
should resist or attempt to escape. This prom-
ise was coupled with a condition that we should
compel Great Britain to surrender what Berlin
asserted to be an illegal blockade. Remember-
ing, possibly, the net into which Napoleon en-
ticed James Madison about 107 years ago, our
Government did not accept the condition, but
warned Germany that her obligations were ** in-
dividual, not joint, absolute, and not relative. '*
We rested easier; but we now realize that this
willingness to forego the sinking of peaceful
vessels and the taking of lives can be accounted
for by the fact that the old U-boats were being
destroyed and the Teutonic Powers did not then
have in readiness the large and improved mon-

AMERICA IN THE WAR 25

sters of the deep with, which to carry on the
work of destruction. Conditions were bad
enough during the later half of 1916, but with
the beginning of the new year ruthless warfare
was openly and brazenly instituted. With the
announcement that no warning would be given
when ships were sunk within a war zone (1917),
cutting off nearly the whole coast of Western
Europe, President Wilson sent the German Am-
bassador home, and war seemed inevitable.
One of the astounding revelations of the poli-
tical methods of the German Foreign Office was
the announcement, made by the Chancellor to
the Reichstag and the German people, that
President Wilson had broken off diplomatic re-
lations abruptly, although the step was taken
eighteen months or more after the exchange of
dispatches on the Lusitania crime, and half a
year after the exchange of notes about the
Sussex.

Why did President Wilson, after long effort
to maintain neutrality and even to hasten the
coming of peace, finally advocate war? Before
attempting to answer this question let us recall
the President's efforts to bring the conflicting
nations to a statement of their terms, and to
hold out to the world the conception of the es-
tablishment of permanent peace. The Presi-

26 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

dent's message on this subject came out almost
simultaneously with Germany's proposal in
which she suggested peace on the basis of an as-
sumed victory for her army. Such a peace the
Allied nations could not accept without accept-
ing militarism, without losing the all-important
objects for which millions of men had already
given their lives; and probably most of us in
America believed that such proposals were put
forth chiefly to make the German people think
that the Allies were the aggressors, and must
bear the odium of further conflict. When the
President called on the warring nations to state
their terms, possibly he still cherished the hope
that, if terms were frankly stated, negotiations
might actually be begun ; almost certainly he de-
sired such open statement as would show to
the world at large the real essence of the con-
flict, and also show that we were not ready to
enter the struggle until we had made every
possible effort to bring peace. The President's
appeal produced no very tangible results, al-
though the Allied Powers stated their desires
and purposes with considerable definiteness,
and these terms did not appear to us unreason-
able or unworthy.

Throughout this time the President and all
thinking Americans were interested chiefly in

AMERICA IN THE WAR 27

the maintenance of civilization, and they looked
forward not merely to victory or to the acquisi-
tion of territory by one or another nation, but
to the foundation of a lasting peace by the estab-
lishment of principles of justice and reason.
We found that we could not paint in too dark
colors the future of the world if we are all to
remain under the pall of fear and suspicion,
and under the overwhelming burden of arma-
ment; and thus we came to see that without
America's entrance into this war there was lit-
tle hope for relief from the crushing weight of
war and the almost equally burdensome weight
of ever-increasing armed preparation. Never,
it appeared, in the long history of mankind was
there such a fearful alternative, never a louder
call to duty. America, without the hope of
profit, with no mean or hidden purpose, must
herself fight to maintain the principles of civil-
ization and for the hope of lasting peace and
propriety between nations.

Many of us came to realize the incredible
fact that Germany menaced our safety, that if
the war lords of Prussia were successful we
were in actual and immediate danger. I know
nothing more magnificent and imperial in its
effrontery than the remark made by the Kaiser
to the American Ambassador that he would

28 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

stand no more nonsense from America after this
war! Still, we could scarcely credit what ap-
pears to be the truth, that — if I may attribute
to the Kaiser the offensive words of Napoleon
— America was within the scope of his policy.
Possibly it was shameful in us to wait and to
rely on the Allied Powers when we began to
feel that their defeat imperiled our own safety.
But something more than fear was needed to
force us into the fight ; not until the issues were
clear to the nations of the world, not until there
was hope for a constructive peace, not till we
heard the call of humanity, were we prepared
to fling in our power and resources.

Doubtless our final entrance into the conflict
was brought about by cumulative irritation at
German methods and policies. Our conviction
of their unworthiness grew gradually day by
day. This conviction was the result of experi-
ence, of having actually lived through a great
crisis. Among these irritations, which opened
our eyes and hardened our hearts, none was
more powerful than the machinations of the
German spies. We were more than irritated,
we were enlightened ; we discovered what Welt-
politik and Realpolitik really were — German
espionage helped us to grasp the nature of a
principle which is essentially criminal and

AMERICA IN THE WAR 29

which, if it continues, must make decent interna-
tional relationships quite impossible. And so
this fact began to stand out strongly : Democ-
racy cannot survive in an atmosphere of inde-
cent intrigue — Democracy is comparatively
helpless in a game of secret skill and of stealthy
manipulation.

America came to see, by April, 1917, that she
must enter the struggle, and sacrifice, if need
be, all but honor to put down arrogant militar-
ism and strutting autocracy, the remnants of
an outworn practice of life and mode of thought.
The world was too small to contain two funda-
mentally hostile principles of life. It took the
devastation of this horrible calamity, the death
of millions, the crippling of tens of millions, the
semi-starvation of a continent, the drowning of
our own people, the slimy intrigue in our own
nation, the practice of studied cruelty in Bel-
gium and Poland — it needed all this to open our
blind eyes; but at last we saw. There was no
use in arguing about it; the world was too small,
too organically united; it could not encompass
two warring principles of life — warring, that
is to say, and deadly in their antagonisms even
in times of so-called peace ; for the deadliest of
enemies are ideas and ideals that in, of, and
through themselves lead to differing goals.

30 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

There was no use in talking about it ; the world
cannot permanently exist or longer live half
slave and half free. We have to make the world
safe for Democracy.

President Wilson has not, as some people
think, asserted that Prussia must adopt a demo-
cratic Government. He has simply said that
German rulers cannot be trusted ; any arrange-
ment with them for peace, unbacked by the peo-
ple of Germany, would be a bauble. Does any-
body doubt that the German Government is not
trusted I The question is not whether it ought
to be trusted ; as to that, some ignorant person
might break into an argument. The question
is not whether we may ultimately have to sign
a peace with the gilded and brazen rulers of
Germany ; on that point some faint-hearted per-
son might start a discussion. The question is :
Does anybody trust the Government? The
President has also pointed out that a peace
which is really vital must be a peace of peoples.
Anybody doubting that has not got very far
into the meaning of this horrible catastrophe.
We are not, let us hope, giving up the lives of
our boys for a **peace^* hanging on the shaky
word of a Berlin Government. And nothing
but the righteous sense and serene judgment of
everyday people who have seen light and love

AMERICA IN THE WAR 31

the sunshine of friendliness — nothing else can
give ns hope for humanity.

And this leads me to say, what you will know,
that the whole fate of democracy is involved
in this war, and that out of it, to use the words
of Lincoln, must come a new birth of freedom.
It is not merely that the hosts of Germany have
turned under regal leadership against the demo-
cratic nations of the West and hoped to crush
them by weight of arms and barbaric fury. It
is not alone our territorial integrity or even
our forms of government which are imperiled ;
the spirit and breadth of open-minded, cheerful,
hopeful and trustful democracy are in danger.
Democracy is and must be sociable, friendly,
and helpful, or it belies its own character and
denies its own philosophy. It cannot breathe
the fetid air of intrigue, espionage, and hidden
malice. Democracy is built on faith, faith in the
elementary rectitude, the substantial validity
of human life and purposes. If it is not trust-
ful and open-hearted and hopeful it falsifies
its own being. The time has come when once
for all it must be decided on which philosophy
of life humanity will rest.

In all its aspects democracy is purely a mat-
ter of human relations. The time was when
we thought only of individual freedom or of

32 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

social and political equality. But by processes
of natural inevitable growth we have passed on
to a fuller relation of democratic obligation.
Democracy involves helpfulness and friendly
companionship; there can be no such thing as
an insulated democratic individual, and there
can be no such thing as an insulated democratic
nation; the spirit of companionableness and co-
operation must express itself in international
relations and manifest itself in ordinary inter-
course between governments and people. That
we shall always act in highest accord with the
essential ideals of this philosophy of life one
dare not prophesy; but such, I maintain, is the
logical and necessary product of a developing
spirit. Democracy is in its essence essentially
human, not merely political or governmental;
and the inmost significance of this struggle con-
sists in this : we are menaced by a force and a
philosophy hideously at variance with the pri-
mary and heartfelt instincts of democratic life.
This very force has compelled democracy to
expand itself beyond the confines of national
boundaries, and to demand the recognition of
its principles as the foundation of peace and of
a hopeful progressive human and humane
world-order.

The passing years have shown, then, that self-

AMERICA IN THE WAR 33

contained, purely national democracy is not
enough. We cannot be inwardly democratic,
outwardly autocratic. We may not demand that
Prussia adopt the forms of popular govern-
ment— though these must come to her, unless
she stand aside free from the currents of mod-
ern civilization — but we can and will demand
that she abide by the code of democratic fair-
play and fair-mindedness. If she is unable or
unwilling to think as the outside world is think-
ing, she must be made incompetent. The dis-
tinguished gentleman who so kindly introduced
me this evening used these words some months
ago: ** Prussia must be powerless or free." It
would be sheerest folly now not to see the whole
fact clearly. The world cannot remain half
free and half Prussian ; and the essential ethics
of Democracy must be boldly adopted as the
guiding principle of international intercourse
and human progress. Those ethical principles,
we may remind ourselves again, are not so much
intellectual and spiritual, not so much political
as human and social — they rest on faith, on
responsibility, on helpfulness, and companion-
able cooperation.

That this war will bring in a revivified and
enlarged sense of social obligation and develop
within each of the nations now fighting for

34 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

democratic ideals a new appreciation of duties
as well as rights, we now see is inevitable ; but
it must, I repeat, do more than this. It must
extend those ideals beyond the limits of indi-
vidual conduct or internal policy. Unless these
ideals permeate the philosophy of the world,
domestic democracy is endangered. Even for
our own salvation we must strive, then, for in-
ternational democracy — I mean, of course, toler-
ance, frankness, forbearance, open-mindedness,
faith, and companionship.

That, you will say, is a big program. Well,
this is a big war. It will bring big, inconceiva-
bly big, psychological results. A new world is
before us. To some extent we can make it
what we will; and what it will be depends, so
far as conscious effort can bring things to pass,
on the purpose and desire of the English-speak-
ing peoples. We must not fail, we simply must
not fail. Let us not lose ourselves, our inherent
character, and let us highly resolve to carry
forward into the days of peace that feeling of
mutual respect, that sense of friendly coopera-
tion by which we are now possessed. This we
must do for our own welfare and for the wel-
fare of the outside world.

BRITISH AND AMERICAN
RELATIONS

BRITISH AND AMERICAN RELATIONS

On the second anniversary of the Battle of
the Marne, M. Ribot, the French premier, in an
eloquent address, used these words: *' Prance
joins with the civilized world in revindicating
guarantees for a peace which will not be a mere
truce, but a lasting concord founded upon right.
Where can these guarantees be found! It is
for the German people to realize that it rests
with them to supply them by throwing off their
yoke of military despotism, which, besides being
a heavy burden for themselves, is also a danger
to the rest of the world. If they refuse to be-
come a peaceful democracy, it will be their eco-
nomic interests that will run the risk of being
attacked through the league of common defense
that the nations will find themselves forced to
organize against them. They who wish to in-
flict upon the world the constant menace of an
aggression cannot complain that the world
should seek to protect itself by all the means at

37

38 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

its disposal. A nation cannot isolate herself
without incurring mortal risks, and it is con-
demning one's self to isolation to disturb the
world in its needs for peace, which will become
still more imperious after such a war. ' '

The nation that sets itself up in isolation not
only menaces the peace of the world, and men-
aces it a thousand fold if it be militant and sul-
len, but it seeks to shut itself off from the per-
meating forces of civilization. That fundamen-
tally was Germany's greatest sin. Ensconced
behind a wall of assumed superiority, nourish-
ing tenderly her own peculiar KuUur, believing
with a puerile simplicity that she alone, the
favorite or only child of the All-Highest, was
possessed of the secrets of life, worshiping
with actual fanaticism the state which was in
possession of unalloyed sovereignty, she fell
upon the outside nations with a savage ferocity
which still amazes the world. Sooner or later
she must be brought to her senses ; how, we do
not clearly know, though we have consecrated
our lives and our property to the task of beat-
ing down and overwhelming the armed might
with which she seeks to defend her uncivilizing
and monstrous pretentions. To this end we
give more than ourselves; we give our sons;
we are prepared to sacrifice all but our honor.

BRITISH-AMERICAN RELATIONS 39

This may seem an unexpected introduction
to a talk on America and Britain, but it is not
inappropriate. For my man's theme is inter-
national duty rather than national rights. Pa-
triotism is not enough; if it were the sum of
the virtues, Germany, the fanatical Father-
land bowing down and offering up human sacri-
fices on the altar of Hohenzollern inerrancy,
would be the most virtuous state alive. If the
war teaches anything, it teaches that humanity
is greater than narrow-minded patriotism. Do
not misunderstand me : I have not said that pa-
triotism is not good ; a man must love his coun-
try, his town, and his own fireside or he is less
than human. I only say that the nation setting
up its own gilded image for worship has trans-
muted a virtue into a vice and menaces civiliza-
tion.

My purpose to-day is to take up for considera-
tion the historical relationships between Brit-
ain and America. I shall not attempt to go into
details, but only to present a few elementary
things. We shall have to glance at some of the
troubles and misunderstandings of the past, but
these will, I think, disclose the basis for good
understanding now and in the future; for
though America broke away from Britain in the
eighteenth century and though in the next cen-

40 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

tury there were years of hostility and hittemess,
the fundameiital fact is the development of
similarities, and a growing appreciation of
identity of interests becanse of identity of basic
political and social principles. In discussing
these historical relationships, we shall have to
notice the errors of Britain, and perhaps I shall
seem to you to overemphasize them. If I do
so, it will be because I am willing by glossing
over the shortcomings and the faults of the past,
to weaken any plea for good understanding
now and in the future. Fortunately Britain
has never been foolishly sensitive. The aver-
age man of these islands with an admirable
pride in his fatherland, has always unsparingly
criticized its conduct. It is not necessary to go
to histories written in Deutschland, to find a re-
cital of Britain's errors. If our wishes to find,
for example, a magnanimous and generous
story of the American cause in the War of In-
dependence and an almost unqualified condem-
nation of British wrong-headedness let him go
to Trevelyan's American Revolution and not to
any recent work by an American writer. The
American historian, more keenly aware, it
seems, of the difficulties of imperial administra-
tion than is the Englishman himself, now writes
with tolerant sympathy, almost defensively, of

BRITISH-AMERICAN RELATIONS 41

those measures of imperial order whicli cul-
minated in our cutting the apron strings which
had tied us to an indulgent but bungling mother
country. We talk, you and I, of our coming
together in intelligent appreciation of the past ;
if we do not take care we shall pass each other
in the dark; it would be an amusing product
of our anxiety to be fair if American scholars
should in the end upbraid Englishmen because
the Englishman would not admit the difficulty,
perhaps one might say the impossibility of man-
aging from Westminster and holding perma-
nently in the empire some millions of self-de-
pendent and self-willed people.^

So loathsome do I consider the boastful ex-
uberance of Teutonic patriotism that I almost

* An illustration of this amusing contradiction appeared in a
brief discussion at the Royal Historical Society in which I
said that the American Revolution and the break up of the old
empire occurred because the British Parliament was unable or
unwilling to accept certain principles in the make-up of the
empire. "But after all/' I added, "if the break had not come
on that account, it is not unlikely it would have come for some
other reason. Governing people like the American colonists,
three thousand miles away from the seat of government,
brought up almost impossible tasks of administration. ' ' An
English gentleman present quite disagreed with me, saying that
there was, in his opinion, no reason in the world why the
empire should not have rem.ained unbroken, if the Government
had had a little sense. I mention this difference of opinion, not
to indicate that one of us was right and the other wrong, but
to show how there may be differences due possibly to excessive
desire to be fair minded; of course such an argument, dealing
with what might have been, is fruitless at the best, for what
might have happened did not happen; and history deals with

42 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

shrink from the task of setting forth what I be-
lieve to be the mission and the character of
America and I hesitate to speak of the obliga-
tions and mutual responsibilities of the English-
speaking peoples, lest I appear to distort the
truth and to place these two nations on some
peak of isolated grandeur arrogating to them-
selves the wisdom, culture and conscience of the
world. But the simple fact is that a great bur-
den has been thrust upon us ; and it is now our
duty, acting harmoniously together, to carry
the world through the present misery and on-
ward to better things. With no assumption of
our innocence or perfection, we must reach out
beyond ourselves and extend the spirit of de-
mocracy as the basis of world organization and
progress. As I sought to point out in my last
lecture, this duty has been thrust upon us, and
we have found that democratic institutions, that
are really based on the philosophy of demo-
cratic life, are not safe within national bound-
aries, as long as aggressive militarism, with
the national accompaniments of stealth and in-
trigue, menaces the world.

The essence of democracy is social relation-
realities and not suppositions. The historical fact is that Great
Britain was then incapable of managing wisely colonies which
had been allowed to develop naturally and in which the prin-
ciples of English freedom had been strengthened by the oppor-
tunities of unfettered life on a new continent.

BEITISH- AMERICAN RELATIONS 43

ship, its soul is friendliness, its heart is com-
panionship. To promote this spirit in the world
is primarily the task of two nations having the
surest basis for friendly understanding, and
sympathy, two nations using the same language,
sprung from the same root of political prin-
ciple and effort; heirs (though some of our citi-
zens may have been born in Bohemia and Po-
land or Greece) of John Eliot and Pym and
Hampden and Sydney and John Milton. It is
our task to work together for justice and rea-
son in the world about us. Fundamental prin-
ciples of liberty, taking their rise in Britain,
have had tremendous influence on the world;
neither the soldiers of CromwelPs army when
they drew up the *^ Agreement of the People''
nor John Milton when he wrote the Areopagi-
tica, acted and wrote as the passing years have
shown for Britain alone ; and now the time has
come for both nations, which owe so much to the
courageous defenders of liberty, to carry on the
struggle openly and boldly for a wider and
deeper application of the ethics of freedom.
We in America feel, and must feel more fully
still, the necessity of coming into intimate and
intelligent friendliness with the British people.
I am speaking now not of diplomatic alliances
or of any form of political arrangement.

44 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

Thoug-h, of course, the American people must
develop their own life, and expand and clarify
their own character, we should be anxious to
learn from others, and above all to feel sym-
pathy with the mind and purposes of the masses
of the British people, whose outlook on the
world, whose sense of moral obligations, are, I
believe, essentially in harmony with our own.
All formalities of political cooperation aside, in-
telligent friendliness should be within the range
of the possible, anything less leads to a dark
and forbidding world.

In speaking of such ill-feeling, or such ab-
sence of sympathy — to speak gently — as Ameri-
cans have entertained towards Britain, it is
customary to speak as if it were all due to the
remembrance of the American Revolution.
Doubtless the story of the Revolution, the war
that established American Independence, oc-
cupies in the mind of the average American a
space and a prominence that an Englishman
can scarcely appreciate ; you have had so many
wars, so many defeats and victories ; you have
made so many mistakes and done so much de-
serving the admiration of the world, that you
find it hard to realize that this war still looms
so large and means so much to the Americans.
But it is withal a mistake to attribute American

BRITISH-AMERICAN RELATIONS 45

feeling to the Revolution alone, it is a mis-
take to neglect nearly a century of history after
the Revolution and to lose sight of the fact
that the governments of the two nations, though
gradually learning to dispose of difficulties in a
seemly way, were often engaged in dangerous
disputes, and that there were many things be-
sides diplomatic controversy tending to keep
alive in America a certain feeling of opposition
or at the best a certain feeling of difference and
diversity of interest and sentiment.

Britain's mistreatment of American com-
merce during the Napoleonic period is one of
the things which has found a lasting lodgment
in the mind of the American schoolboy. He is
apt to forget that Jefferson said that England
had become a den of pirates and France a nest
of thieves, that England was fighting as she
is to-day, against a usurper itching for world-
domination, whose plans contemplated an em-
pire in every continent of the globe and that
England's so-called piracy was tender and com-
passionate when compared with the modern va-
riety practised by Germany under the sweet
title of freedom of the seas.

After the war of 1812 came fifty years and
more of unfriendliness and just now I am will-
ing to place the main burden for that hostility

46 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

on Britain. It is a dismal story, a story of ar-
rogance and, in part, carefully nourished ill-
will, and it discloses the criminal folly of petty
personal animosity. There were breaks in the
clouds, but on the whole I offer no excuse, only
stopping to say that any one supposing that
America meanwhile walked the primrose path
of gentleness has no knowledge of the bump-
tiousness of our days of national adolescence.
Britain ^s career in the world at large during
the first sixty years or so of the nineteenth
century has its dark and repellent side — the
opium war, the Crimea, and the swagger of
Palmerstonian imperialism cannot be remem-
bered with equanimity, nor can the long policy
of protection and friendliness for the unspeak-
able Turk.

American democracy during those decades
was often crude, boastful and self-satisfied. It
often showed itself in its less lovely aspects to
foreigners, who in their turn failed to see in
our rapidly developing country a pure idealism
and a lofty faith which was even then affect-
ing the outside world. American diplomacy
was not unskilful; but the art and courtesy of
the diplomatist often suffered from the high-
flown speech of the politician, who with a fatal
gift of words poured out his periods on the

BRITISH- AMERICAN RELATIONS 47

hustings, and even on the floor of Congress.
That our tone and temper were irritating there
can be no doubt, and one special practise, known
commonly as twisting the tail of the British
lion, was often used to arouse the enthusiasm
of the orator's audience.

The British traveler who, like Charles Dick-
ens or Mrs. Trollope, lampooned American life
for the amusement of his own people and held
up to view the crudities, vulgarities and sim-
plicities of our unsophisticated society, did un-
told damage. The sharp and unfriendly criti-
cism of British journals also was deeply re-
sented and brought forth keen retorts from
American writers. This constant campaign of
journalistic recrimination, which the people of
Britain have long ago forgotten or ignored,
kept alive for decades a bitterness of feeling
which might otherwise have disappeared or
been greatly modified by the passing years.
Such English writers as pleased themselves by
depicting American shortcomings and follies
might have taken a lesson from Harriet Marti-
neau who summed up the situation truthfully
and nobly by saying there is the greatest hope
for a people that can cherish high ideals.
Though these ideals were often expressed in
extravagant and boastful terms — they were real

48 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

and elemental but the literary or articulate
classes of Britain would not see them, and in-
deed did not, I fear, desire to see them. No one
wishing to understand American history can
omit the sentiments of democratic idealism
which animated the people from the days of
the Revolution to — when? Well, how shall I
answer? During the last twenty years we have
been criticizing ourselves unmercifully, looking
askance at our constitution — the oldest and most
conservative national constitution in the world
— finding faults with our courts, grumbling
about our pitiful municipal governments, ques-
tioning our capacity to manage the perplexing
and pressing problems of social and economic
order, envious, in some measure, of the hard
glittering efficiency of Germany; for the first
time in our national history we were becoming
distrustful of our own superior capacity and our
own high destiny, although in reality we were
taking a firmer hold on duty and cleansing our-
selves from much of our former error. I have
not as yet answered my question as to when
this strain of idealism disappeared from
American character, but I can now answer. It
has not disappeared at all. To-day the land
is filled with more than a hatred of Ger-
man MacJitpolitik. The people have not been

BKITISH-AMERICAN RELATIONS 49

aroused by fear for themselves, though perhaps
they should have been; they have not been
stirred by hope of material profit; they have
not been moved by motives of revenge — 1 mean,
none of these has been the chiefest influence
drawing them into the world war. They hate
German Machtpolitik, because it is the policy of
force ; they detest cruelty because it is cruelty ;
they loathe deceit and barbarity because deceit
and barbarity are loathesome. But I believe I
am right in declaring that the appeals made by
President Wilson to essential sense of right and
justice, the demand that the world be freed from
dynastic ambitions which are fed by military
aggression, the call for the succor of ravished
Belgium and martyrized Serbia, the need of sav^
ing democracy from the grasp of imperialistic
autocracy, the realization that America owes a
duty not to herself alone but also to the world —
these things have fired the American heart and
made us resolve not to lay down the sword till
Hohenzollern arrogance shall give way to de-
cency and truth. We have some hold on the be-
lief, some faint hold at least, some portion of
assured trust, that we are now fulfilling our des-
tiny and doing our duty, that we are really in
some degree responsive to the injunction of the
American poet :

50 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

*'Be thou the guardian of the weak,
Of the unfriended, thou the friend,
No guerdon for thy valour seek,
No end beyond the avowed end.
Wouldst thou thy godlike power preserve,
Be godlike in thy will to serve.'*

I do not wish to speak boastfully : no Ameri-
can that I know is in a boastful mood ; we are not
trumpeting our valor or our power. But you
will forgive me, I am sure, if my heart is
warmed by the belief that America is not false
to its own past and to its high convictions. You
will forgive me if I am moved by the sight, to
use Milton's words,^ of a noble and puissant na-
tion rousing herself to take part with fortitude
and courage in this horrible war which has al-
ready brought desolation to your firesides, and
to take part in it with no thought save that of
service. God grant that by your side in suffer-
ing and in the elation of victory, we and you
may cling fast to those sentiments of justice
and rectitude which the world sorely needs if
civilization is to survive. Omitting for the pres-
ent any further reference to British and Ameri-
can errors during the last century, because I

* * ' Methinks T see in my mind a noble and puissant nation
rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her
Invincible locks, methinks I see her as an eagle renewing her
mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full
midday beam I ' '

BRITISH-AMERICAN RELATIONS 51

shall need to refer to tliem again, let ns grasp
at once a main and elemental fact.

Both Britain and America were living; they
were stumbling through experiences and devel-
oping character. An historical student resents
almost with anger the way the laymen often use
history ; for it is not history at all. The unhis-
torical man is too likely to seize upon some inci-
dent, to detach it from its environment, and to
hurl it as a missile in argument, as if history
were but a basket of pebbles snugly fitting the
hand. It is true that a nation's character and
quality can be discovered by what it does ; there
is no other way of discovery. If I wished to tell
what kind of a psychosis Germany has to-day, I
should say that her hero is that old scamp, Fred-
erick the Great. History, however, does not
deal with separated incidents but with life and
growth. Nations, perhaps more surely than sep-
arate individuals, change in character, in
psychological reactions. Nothing can be more
humorous than to suppose you can know Britain
to-day solely by knowing what she was a hun-
dred and forty years ago. It would probably
be safer to say that a boy who ^* swiped '^ an ap-
ple from a farmer's wagon would surely grow
into a bandit. There are, of course, certain
traits, qualities and aptitudes of national char-

52 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

acter that are discovered by tracing the course
of its history ; there may possibly be special il-
luminating incidents ; but the law of history and
of life is change and adaptation. Even Ger-
many, still ruled by a conception of kingship
that came out of the later middle ages and by
worse than that, has undergone change ; and the
world outside her borders has but one prayer to-
day and that is that the experiences of this war
will bring conversion and regeneration.

In England there have been for centuries
two conflicting forces. There were, it is true,
times of almost complete stagnation, but during
those times there was a more or less uncon-
scious preparation for the next step forward,
a gathering of strength to move on toward a
fuller and freer life. I shall not carry you far
back into this struggle; let us begin with the
seventeenth century, about the time that Prus-
sia, no bigger than a man's hand, appeared on
the horizon and began, with war as its ^^ national
industry, '^ that steady policy of aggression
which has now drenched Europe in blood. Those
were the days of the Great Rebellion in Eng-
land when the opponents of the divine right of
kings were formulating and putting to practi-
cal use the revolutionary philosophy which
America in later years used so effectively. If

BRITISH-AMERICAN RELATIONS 53

any one would understand the present conflict
or our debt to Britain, he must go back to those
years, and see what it meant that Sir John Eliot
died in the Tower and Hampden gave up his
life on Chalgrove Field. Before the end of the
century, England's sovereign rested his power
on parliamentary authority. In reality power
passed to the great Wliig families ; England was
essentially an aristocracy and there ensued
three-quarters of a century in which there was
comparatively little upward movement toward
modern democracy. Still England had a Par-
liament, she had a crude, imperfect and corrupt
representative system, and, even if her states-
men and publicists paid only lip service to the
principle, they taught and believed that govern-
ment springs from consent, originates in the
people and is bounded in the exercise of its
power by human rights and justice. Of the
early decades of George III. you know the con-
ditions well ; they are brilliantly told in Trevel-
yan's Fox and can be seen face to face in Wal-
pole's letters. Trevelyan tells us that there is
no more evidence of Christian Religion in Hor-
ace Walpole's writings than in those of Pliny
the younger. I have been a somewhat careful
reader of Walpole and can support Sir George's
statement. It was Voltaire who uttered the fa-

54 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

mous epigram that there was no more religion
in England than the minimum necessary for
party purposes ; and we may remember that it
has been said that no politician worthy of his
craft thought it wise to get along without a
clergyman in his train. The sudden access of
wealth and power with the defeat of France in
Canada and India, the coming in of wealthy
planters from the East and West Indies, intro-
duced what Pitt called Asiatic habits of life and
threatened to bring in Asiatic principles of poli-
tics.

T\lien the American Revolution came on,
Britain was ready, or nearly ready, for another
move forward; there were signs of awakening.
Vulgar ostentation, corruption in high places,
dissipation, venality, low-browed appreciation
of national obligations, were not all. In re-
ligion, in political economy, in industry, even in
politics there are some evidences that a new
and better England was coming. For the really
great and creative forces of the time were rep-
resented by John Wesley, Adam Smith, Ark-
wright and Hargreave, Edmund Burke, Fox and
Pitt. Of course the tide had not clearly turned
till fifty years and more after the beginning of
our revolutionary era; but even in its days of
social frivolity, Britain's condition was not

BRITISH-AMERICAN RELATIONS 55

hopeless. It is a striking fact that Smith's
Wealth of Nations was published in the year of
the American Declaration of Independence. It
meant in all its reasoning and its ethics the com-
ing in of a new school of thought, the founda-
tion principles of liberal trade on which Britain
in the next century was to raise the mighty
structure of imperial commerce. The philos-
ophy of Burke, the open-hearted humanism of
Fox, the new, free and rational economy of
Adam Smith, the inventions of textile machin-
ery by Hargreave and Arkwright — these were
the things which were to make over the old-time
Britain and to raise her to a new position of
usefulness.

However this may all be, the American Rev-
olution came as a great shock to Britain. The
effects of that Revolution and the French Rev-
olution are hard to trace. In part, no doubt,
influences worked at cross purposes ; a new or-
der of political thinking forced itself in, new
conceptions of personal worth and freedom af-
fected Britain as they did the continent; and
still, especially as the result of the excesses of
the French Revolution and of the long wars
against Napoleon, certain forces of reaction
were given sufficient strength to maintain them-
selves till their grip was loosened by the reform

56 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

measure of 1832. Despite these reactionary
forces, the fortress of feudalism — I use Gold-
win Smith's phrase — ^began, I believe, during
our Revolutionary era to show evidences of
weakening.

Now if we look more carefully at the Revolu-
tion itself, the first thing we see, as some wise
man has said, is the England of the seventeenth
century arising to combat the England of the
eighteenth. This is most literally and start-
lingly true. The English race split asunder in
the seventeenth century, not in the eighteenth:
the Revolution broke the political connection.
The men that settled the colonies, especially
those coming to Massachusetts, carried with
them the thinking and the principles of the
Great Rebellion of the seventeenth century.
And so when Britain in the eighteenth century,
under the guidance of a stiff-necked German
monarch, and under the sway of a junker aris-
tocracy, sought to tax America and to set up
the complete and unlimited authority of Par-
liament, America was prepared to meet her —
how? By reference to the precedents and the
principles of English liberty, by insisting that
the doctrines which Britain had produced and
which had grown strong in her self-governing
colonies, should be applied in the empire as a

BRITISH-AMERICAN RELATIONS 57

whole. This should be fully noticed, and may
I say to add emphasis to this assertion that that
particular period has been my special field of
study for twenty years ? I may be vain if I say
that I speak with some authority, but certainly
I speak with assurance. The American Revolu-
tion is, on the whole, the chief jewel in the im-
perial diadem of Britain; it was one of her
greatest deeds. It was based on English born
philosophy ; it was waged by colonists who had
developed in freedom; it carried forward to a
higher stage, or onward toward maturity, those
principles and practises for the foundation of
which Englishmen had given their lives. None
but English colonies could have made such a
fight for independence, none but Englishmen,
who in the new world had had new opportunities
for self-realization, could have institutionalized,
made over into written legal binding form, those
fundamental precepts of individual liberty
which had not yet found full expression in
Britain itself. When I say ^^none but English-
men" could have done so, I am not speaking in
terms of race, or theoretically, I am speaking
historically. Where in the eighteenth century
could be seen other colonists able to find, in the
history and institutions of their mother coun-
try, foundations for declared principles of self-

58 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

government! Who but English colonists could
at that time have written those amazingly ad-
vanced, conservative, human, clever, determined
and wise state papers that came from the pens
of Dickinson, Samuel Adams, Jefferson and
others of that brilliant revolutionary group?
But — if I must cling closely to historical facts
and not indulge in **coulds'' and *^ mights'^ — it
is sufficient to say, no others did do it ; and that
is enough. No one but Englishmen established
American Independence, and this they did on
the basis of English history. This they did
possibly because of native racial capacity, and
certainly because they had been allowed self-
development. You would not turn — would you ?
— to the France of Louis the XVth, to the
Prussia of that grim old robber Frederick, or
to any principality of the kings and princelings
of autocratic Germany, to decadent old Spain,
to distracted Italy, or to half-barbaric Russia
under Catherine II., of whom the less is said
the better.

I have been speaking of principles of indi-
vidual liberty, and the practise of representa-
tion as a protection of liberty — of the institu-
tions and the ideals which Englishmen in Amer-
ica carried out beyond the stage to which Eng-
land herself had at that time developed them.

BRITISH-AMERICAN RELATIONS 59

But there was more than that. Turn where we
may, we are struck, if we study carefully, first
by the remarkable political astuteness of the
American Englishmen of the eighteenth cen-
tury, the remarkable cleverness with which they
used principles and made them real in working
institutions, and, second, by the fact that in an
astonishingly large part of their work they only
adapted, only shaped, fitted and adjusted insti-
tutions, principles and practises which had their
home in Britain. We have in America several
qualities and several political institutions or
modes of action which we consider peculiarly
American, or, if we admit that some of them are
no longer peculiar to us because they have
reached out over the globe, we think of them
as American creations. The qualities I have in
mind are in large degree due to life on a free,
wide open continent — socially, industrially, in-
tellectually, America is the child of a spacious
continent. The institutions or the forms of po-
litical action are the fixed written constitutions,
the limited government, the power and inde-
pendence of the courts, and the general system
of federal order. By this last I mean the gen-
eral structure of the United States as a whole —
a body of states, acting side by side, each with
its quota of independent authority, and, acting

60 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

coordinately with them, a central government
charged with duties of a broader scope but of
specific character. Whence came these institu-
tions, these mechanisms, these forms of politi-
cal action, these habits of political thought?
Largely from Britain. Indeed, wherever you
dig — I shall probably not exaggerate — ^wherever
you really dig down into things to understand
them by finding their origin, you will be almost
sure to find two things — our two parents, the
**frontier'' and the old British Empire. I spent
several years in studying just one institutional
principle that we think peculiarly our own, the
right of a court to declare a law unconstitu-
tional, a principle England does not have. In
making this study I had not gone far before I
found myself in the philosophy of the American
Revolution, I found the American of that time
making use of the philosophy and the judicial
dicta of the British seventeenth century, I be-
came familiar with Coke and Hobart and Pym
and the soldiers of CromwelPs army, with the
levelers of the middle seventeenth century, with
Harrington and Sydney and Locke; I was ex-
amining, too, the structure and operations of the
old colonial empire. I discovered, in other
words, that even that institution could be un-

BRITISH-AMERICAN RELATIONS 61

derstood only by a study of English and Brit-
ish imperial history.

I have studied and examined for years the
principles on which rest our federal structure,
i. e., that compounded, that multiple state, we
call the United States. Whence came it! Why
came it? The form has now spread over the
world. Switzerland, Germany, Mexico, most of
South America, Canada, Australia, are now fed-
eral states. Where did this peculiarly useful
and viable form of imperial order come from?
From the old British Empire. And the tragedy
of the American Revolution, or the comedy of
the whole thing is that, when the Americans
claimed the advantages of federalism in the dec-
ade of discussion between 1765 and 1775, — when
they claimed, that is to say, that each colony,
like one of our present states in the nation, had
an indefeasible right to its own quota of free
action, the Englishmen of Parliament could not
see that the empire was already federal, already
multiple, already non-unitary. And so we broke
away and institutionalized, made over into our
own legally-based institutions, the structure and
the spirit of the old Empire which Britain had
allowed to develop in freedom in America.

There is something inspiring and almost
startling in the unerring way in which one 's re-

62 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

searches carry him back to British and espe-
cially to imperial history. Moreover, when we
study British imperial history, we are struck by
the significance of the War of American Inde-
pendence. As we look out on the world to-day
we see two great political bodies — I hesitate to
call them empires since the world commonly
connotes imperialistic ambition and supporting
militarism — those bodies are the British Empire
and the United States of America, and both are
the products of British history. One of them,
the American, is founded totally in its length
and breadth (unless by acquiring dependencies
from Spain after the war of 1898 a change was
wrought in some particulars) on law on a legal
scheme of empire, on the Constitution of the
United States. The other is founded on oppor-
tunism and on opportunity, on the ethics of the
philosopher-statesman Burke. For Burke, the
friend of America and the prophet of success-
ful British imperialism, poured out floods of
captivating eloquence in behalf of freedom as
the soul of successful and honorable expansion
and dominion. Freedom was itself force; not
military coercion, not even legal dictation when
free communities were to be held to duty — not
these, but freedom, constituted compulsion.
How have the passing decades given the proof !

BRITISH-AMERICAN RELATIONS 63

*^The Sons of England/' Burke exclaimed,
*^ worship freedom. . . . The more they multi-
ply, the more friends you will have; the more
ardently they love liberty, the more perfect will
be their obedience. Slavery they can have any-
where. It is a weed that grows in every soil.
They may have it from Spain, they may have it
from Prussia. But freedom they can have only
from you.'' In the eighteenth century, the
thoughtless leaders of British society, busy as
they were with horses, cards and dice, were not
thrilled by the eloquence of the prophet. Not
till the trying days of August, 1914, did Britain
realize that the ethics of Burke, which little by
little had permeated and mastered the princi-
ples, plans and practises of her empire, had
made for her a dominion that was stronger than
the steel of Roman or Teutonic workmanship —
not till 1914, when everywhere, in the woods of
Western Canada, in Australia, in New Zealand,
in forgotten places of the globe where English-
men toiled, young men sprang to arms unsum-
moned, ready to give their lives for an idea, to
sacrifice all for an affection. After all, that is
the outstanding lesson of the war: freedom is
not disintegration, freedom is not dissipation
of duty; freedom is the cement of empire as of
society. Of course it was all dramatically

64 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

brought on, pathetically, tragically brought on
to the world's stage that we might behold it —
those boys from the South Sea gasping with
thirst and dying by thousands at Gallipoli, and
the brave young Canadians at Ypres suffocating
with poisonous gases, still holding on and giv-
ing a new and fresh glory to ghastly and devil-
ish warfare. And there was South Africa, a
self -containing commonwealth, on which the lav-
ish hand of Britain had bestowed complete free-
dom after the defeat of the Boer, now freely
standing by, won by generosity in a decade or
two from enmity and suspicion to loyalty and
readiness to die for the ideals of the empire.

That is the outstanding lesson of the war, and
the horrible tragedy of it is Germany, still cher-
ishing the belief in brutal compulsion, still cher-
ishing conquest, still believing that men can be
terrorized and beaten into humility and service.
This, I say, is the outstanding lesson of the war.
Again it is democracy over against autocracy.
There are many philosophical grounds for faith
in democracy, but among them the chief is this
— that self-compulsion, self-control, the un-
forced acceptance of duty, constitute the essence
of social morality. Therefore when we find, in
a vast empire reaching around the world, mil-
lions of men and women freely answering the

BRITISH-AMERICAN RELATIONS 65

call to duty, freely giving up their property and
their lives because they ought to and want to,
not because they have to, when we see a great
empire relying for its life on the self-imposed
obligation of far away peoples, we have new
faith and new hope, and we realize that under
the most critical test, under the most searching
test imaginable, self-compulsion has demon-
strated its value and its practical strength. Pos-
sibly by superior mandate, by brute force, by
that all-favored thing called efficiency, you can
obtain more symmetry, better order, less con-
stant petty annoyances, but if the last fifty years
and the last four years have not given you new
faith in the essentially ethical and essentially
elevating effect of individual self-control and
democratic management as over against ex-
ternal and superior compulsion, this world has
few interests for you and no prospect of conso-
lation. If the orgy of the Germans in Belgium,
the tragic history of Alsace and Lorraine, the
martyrdom of Poland under the heel of a loot-
ing army, the readiness of a great people to be-
lieve what they are told in a fateful moment of
the world's history, their incapacity to make
their wills felt if they have any, do not move
you to put up patiently with the uneasy, rest-
less, self-assertive strivings of democracy.

66 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

there's no comfortable home for you save in a
Wohnung on the Friedrichstrasse where you
can sit by the window and read on the opposite
wall the pleasant command ^'Verhoten,

J )

BRITISH AND AMERICAN RELATIONS

II

The concluding statement of the last lecture
may seem too far away from American and
British relations; and too far away from the
American Revolution, from which I digressed
to consider the nature of the two great empires
— shall I call them? — of British origin. But the
cry is not so far ; for the American Revolution
— which was a British revolution — was, as I
have said, itself a creative incident in the de-
velopment of British liberalism. And, in the
decades of the nineteenth century, one fact, one
simple but momentous fact, stood out supremely
before the world and before Britain: America
actually was making a success of democracy.
The principles of the Revolution, moreover, re-
acted on the whole of Europe, although the way
in which its fullest effect in Germany was
stamped out under the heel of Bismarck sixty
years ago is a pathetic and dismal story. Do
you suppose it is all just an accident that Amer-
ica, though loathing war, has finally cast in its
lot with the democracies of Western Europe

67

68 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

and has shown, with a fervor which surprises
ourselves, a whole-hearted detestation of mili-
tary conquest and militaristic brutality! Does
this seem accidental, or does our delay in en-
tering the contest now seem due, first to the need
of recovering from amazement ; second, the need
of perceiving the essential danger to democracy ;
third, the need of keen and sure perception of
all the implications of the conflict?

There are scores of other things which we
ought to consider if we view this whole situation
aright. We must be content now with a few of
them. Let us notice first the fact — the simple
but all powerful fact — that for just about one
hundred years, England has been moving on
slowly, sometimes painfully, toward liberalism.
This is a simple statement; but it is often en-
tirely lost sight of. Most of us have not had the
time or the inclination to study the history of
the last century. Therefore, I wish to empha-
size what is so preeminently plain in that his-
tory. The plainest thing is the unintermittent
contest, at times an open struggle, between the
old forces of privilege and the forces of indi-
vidual and social right. Step by step, democ-
racy, or liberalism, won — the expansion of the
suffrage in 1832, 1867, 1884, the repeal of the
Corn Laws which protected the landowner and

BRITISH-AMERICAN RELATIONS 69

burdened the workman, the series of acts which
little by little gave the working classes new life
and opportunity, the growth of a wider, wiser
and deeper faith in the great body of men, a
faith which was much more valuable than mere
legislation, for it filled institutions with new
spirit and reached out to shape and revivify the
whole imperial structure. The culmination of
this movement toward democracy is found in the
series of democratic acts of the early twentieth
century, and England's entry into this war in
which she frankly defends the right of people to
live their own lives without dictation, in which
she frankly and with tremendous spiritual en-
thusiasm stands forth as the protector of popu-
lar institutions against military supervision and
swaggering officialism.

When we speak of the close resemblance of
British to American institutions and principles,
we are sometimes reminded that Britain has a
titled aristocracy and we have not ; and our po-
litical habits of mind make it seem strange to
us that certain men should have rights and
duties as members of the House of Lords, a po-
sition which they obtain by birth and not by ef-
fort or by the system of politics which makes
American senators. To discuss the propriety
or the impropriety of an established aristocracy

70 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

would on sucli an occasion as this be a gross im-
pertinence, and I must content myself with say-
ing that there is, I believe, as strong a faith in
democratic opinion and as much force in pub-
lic sentiment in Britain as in the United States.
Indeed, when I see the array of talent, of in-
tellectual brilliancy and administrative capacity
that openly in Britain preaches and practises
the doctrines of liberalism — I mean which
frankly and fairly believes that the masses of
men must be trusted and that their judgments,
though not unerring, are the surest and safest
guides to human betterment, — when I see the
stern determination of Britain and her readi-
ness to sacrifice her life for the maintenance of
democracy in the world, I feel that comparison
of formal institutions is, at least, for the pres-
ent, odious.

In our view of British history in the last hun-
dred years, let us briefly consider a few other
things. Britain during these years has been, in
Europe as a whole, a force making for liberal-
ism beyond its own borders. I know there are
dark spots in British history during that time ;
I know there were many occasions when her for-
eign policies were shaped by crude materialistic
needs of her own empire ; I know too that, when
I make this charge, I almost repent my making

BRITISH-AMERICAN RELATIONS TI

it, because the fact is preeminently growth from
the old materialistic imperialism toward human
leadership and obligation. But if we look at
any single liberal movement on the continent of
Europe from 1820 to 1914, what do we find?
Well, we find in most of them Britain's foreign
policy and her domestic spirit in sympathy with
democratic development ; we find the nations of
Europe as they advanced away from autocracy
imitating English institutions ; we find the wide
acceptance of the principle of ministerial re-
sponsibility and Germany the only nation of
importance that has not accepted the practise,
except where the American system of provi-
dential government has been adopted. Save
America, no other country was so much an in-
spiration to the restless and hopeless populace
of the continent during the half century between
the death of George III. and the unification of
Italy.

Suppose one should ask the struggling lead-
ers of democratic purpose on the continent dur-
ing those fateful years, when Greece obtained
her independence, when country after country
received written constitutions, when Italy threw
off the odious and terrible yoke of Austria, when
even German states put on the seemings of pop-
ular government by receiving gifts of constitu-

72 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

tions handed down by monarchs, — suppose we
should ask those leaders where they expected in
their contests to discover understanding and
popular sympathy. Do you think they turned
to Berlin, Vienna and Constantinople? Did
Mazzini and Cavour and Garibaldi think of Lon-
don or Berlin as a source of hope and consola-
tion ? The simple truth is that Englishmen had
established in the seventeenth century the
fundamentals of the principles of free govern-
ment which the men of Europe craved in the
nineteenth ; the truth is that Englishmen nearly
three centuries ago cast into the muck heap the
whole theory of divine right of kings of which
William Hohenzollern still swaggeringly boasts.
On the whole, if we put to one side the fact that
Britain herself was moving on to a fuller reali-
zation of popular will in Government, the glar-
ing truth is simply and concretely that dis-
tressed democrats and political refugees fled to
London for breath and to gather new courage.

Suppose we should select the years from, let
us say, 1840 to 1865. Was Britain worse than
other nations, or was she better? I select the
years of Palmerstonian flamboyancy, the years
of the Opium war and the Crimea. Years of
blunder and wrong-doing, in which Britain, how-
ever, was undergoing a change of soul under the

BRITISH-AMERICAN RELATIONS 73

hammering logic of Cobden and the spell of
John Bright 's lofty eloquence. Compare
Britain in the mid century with Prussia, with
France of the third empire under Louis, the his-
trionic, with the dreary states of Italy, — remem-
bering what Gladstone said of Naples, that it
had raised a denial of God into a principle of
government — with Austria practising the policy
and creed of Metternich and squeezing in her
hard hand the peoples of northern Italy, with
America enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law, is-
suing the Ostend Manifesto, announcing the
Dred Scott decision, and ready to enter the mess
of Congressional Reconstruction.

There may be in America still some persons
who cherish ill-will against Britain because of
her conduct during our Civil War. In part this
feeling is a relic of the indignation of the North
because of the Alabama trouble, because Eng-
land sent munitions to the South, because she
quickly acknowledged the belligerency of the
Confederacy. But it is high time that we saw
these things aright. 1st, The only fault in ac-
knowledging belligerency was, if fault at all, in
the haste with which it was done ; 2nd, We are
in no situation to throw stones at England for
exercising the privilege of a neutral to ship mu-
nitions to a belligerent; 3rd, While the Alabama

74 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

matter was trying, Britain paid the damages
settled by a court of arbitration. Again, North-
ern men who lived through the Civil War were
tried by England ^s apparent sympathy with the
South, when they had expected that the official
opinion there would support the North. The
story is a long and exceedingly interesting one ;
can I put the essential truth in a few words!
The suspicion and jealousies produced by old
controversies had not died down by 1860. For
some time past, America had been grasping and
apparently imperialistic, with a more than Brit-
ish imperialism, for she had taken Texas and
California and other portions of the great west
and had looked with more than platonic affec-
tion on Central America and Cuba. For all this
we can offer excuse or palliation, but it in part
accounts for British feeling toward us. To the
average Briton, the whole United States was
blackened with slavery ; and, forgetting that his
own country during the eighteenth century had
reveled in the profits of the slave-trade, he
looked with undue pride on the really noble part
his country had been playing for a generation
in the movement toward the liberation of the
black. But most fundamental of all, America
was not loved but suspected by the conservative
classes, instinctively suspected; a more or less

BRITISH-AMERICAN RELATIONS 75

conscious effort had been made for two genera-
tions to slur America, which was giving, — the
governing classes strove to believe, — a lesson to
the world in the noxious effects of unrestricted
democracy. In the light of all these things, it
was natural that the British government, still
largely in the hands of a small governing class,
should not instantly sympathize with the North.
But we must go a little further in our study.
As we do so, we shall see the American Civil
War — like the Revolution — a crisis and a step
forward in British history. We generally think
of that struggle as ours. It most decidedly was
not ours alone. During the earlier years of the
war, pressure was brought on the British gov-
ernment to recognize the Confederacy as an in-
dependent nation and even to intervene; the
government had too much sense. Blind as it
may have been, it could not make that serious
and gross error, though Gladstone, a member of
the cabinet, in a well-known speech, spoke of
the South as a new nation made by Jefferson
Davis, and lived to make open humble acknowl-
edgment of his unspeakable and tactless blun-
der. When once it was clearly seen by the Brit-
ish people that the contest in America was ac-
tually one between slavery and free labor, the
government, had it so desired, dared not ac-

76 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

knowledge Southern independence. Those were
very trying days for England. The blockade of
our southern ports cut off the supply of cotton
for her factories. Men were thrown out of work,
thousands and tens of thousands faced starva-
tion, but the clear-eyed cotton operatives in-
stinctively grasped the truth; suffer as they
might, no government that was theirs should be
allowed to cast in its lot with a confederacy of
states which recognized the right of capital to
own labor, of the employer to own the body of
the laborer. We now see how much of human
destiny lay in the hands of those simple British
workmen. Fortunately ere long they saw the
principles of public and human faith incarnated
in the person of a great American, a rugged
homely son of the soil, who was raised by char-
acter from poverty and obscurity to the highest
position in a democratic republic. To these sim-
ple working men Lincoln wrote with his own
hand a straightforward, uncondescending, man-
to-man letter, acknowledging their distresses
and assuring them of his faith in their sense of
justice.

If we must select one cardinal fact, one great
illuminating incident in British history and
Anglo-American relations, we should select this
strangely daring disregard of diplomatic prece-

BRITISH-AMERICAN RELATIONS 77

dent and ritual. We should see the President of
thirty million people making a direct, frank,
simple statement to the people of another na-
tion, a people as yet inadequate participants in
their own government. We should point out the
fact that Lincoln knew that peace and good un-
derstanding must rest on the sober judgment of
common men and that governmental methods
must not corrupt the cordiality of plain human
beings whose interests must be in their elements
identical. We need not wonder then that the
men of Britain to-day quote Abraham Lincoln
more freely than they do their own statesmen;
for whom ought they to quote but Lincoln and
Edmund Burke 1 And we need not wonder, but
admire, when we find the President of the
United States to-day concerning himself with
the masses of the people of Europe, who can
obtain nothing but vitiation of their own lives
from the strengthening of aristocratic militar-
ism and the crushing of neighboring democ-
racies.

When did Great Britain become the friend of
America? Its real friendship began when, in
August, 1867, Parliament passed the second re-
form bill and England became a democracy. It
would be difficult probably to over-emphasize
the impression made on the mind and spirit of

78 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

Britain by the death of Lincoln. The tragedy
made men stop and ponder; his life and death
shattered at one blow the argument that sagac-
ity in high places of state rested only with men
of superior station and of aristocratic tradition.
A great democracy had weathered a storm in
which certain elements in the governing classes
of Europe had expected to see it founder ; mis-
takes had been made, but democracy had shown
staying power, faith, determination and respect
for law. The writer in Punch who lampooned
Lincoln in the days of distress and trial openly
confessed his error:

Yes, he lived to shame me from my sneer,
To lame my pencil and confute my pen —

To make me own this hind of princes peer,
This rail-splitter a true born king of men.

How can we doubt that this lesson struck
home to the millions and shook to the base that
old doctrine which England, free as she was, had
not as yet discarded, that men of a restricted
class must hold in their hands the government
of a nation.

Thus far I have rapidly presented a few ele-
mentary facts. By strict adherence to history I
have sought to show how Britain has gradually
become democratic like the States that were once
her colonies. To-day no people see more clearly

BRITISH-AMERICAN RELATIONS 79

than the Britisli people that this war is not only
a democratic but a democratizing war, a war
which must, it seems, unless arrogant German}^
prevail (as prevail she must not and cannot),
bring into working relations the people of many
nations and build peace and progress on the es-
sential every-day needs and impulses of the
plain people. Unless we Americans are false to
our history and false to what we suppose we are,
surely there is nothing strange but only every-
thing inevitable in our standing by the side of
Great Britain, the mother of modern constitu-
tional liberty.

Now, what of the future? Dare one venture
to look ahead"? This war must democratize the
political world, though it would be folly to ex-
pect either complete and immediate alteration
in foreign affairs, or complete internal peace.
There are to be difficult tests of industrial, so-
cial and political readjustment. The effects of
the war must be far-reaching. The war now en-
circles the globe; no group of people is so re-
mote that it has not been furnished with the
ideals of democracy and of militaristic imperial-
ism. Hundreds of millions of men have seen
and heard and thought. To some men, it is true,
the war appears to have taught only that we
must prepare for another; to some men the chief

80 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

lesson seems to be that we must buckle on our
industrial armor to meet tbe organized industry
of other nations; they look forward to super-
organized, politically fostered and government-
ally supervised industrial competition between
great peoples, not seeing that Germany's greed
under governmental supervision brought on this
terrible agony of war, not seeing that peace and
friendliness between nations is almost incon-
ceivable under a regime which Germany's com-
mercial policies so adequately presented to the
world, not seeing even that the forces of mod-
ern society for fifty years have really, in spite
of certain evidences of rampant nationalism,
been breaking down the isolation of nations un-
til publicists are almost ready to throw over-
board the rigid conception of national sove-
reignty which accepts no exterior superstate
compulsion, not seeing that industrial and com-
mercial enterprise is not and cannot be totally
national and that actual unity of interest is an
economic necessity and a real fact which is vio-
lently disregarded by artificial national regula-
tions and interferences. The truth is that po-
litical nationalism to a large extent belies inter-
national reality, and patriotism is not enough.
We may well question whether, by a strange re-
vival of currents, we must go to British work-

BRITISH-AMERICAN RELATIONS 81

ing men to gather now what Lincoln called a
new birth of freedom? But surely we all see
that peace, prosperity and progress must de-
pend on the spread and the realization of a
deeper and cleaner civilization ; and this we hope
for out of the mire and the cruelty of war.
Peace and prosperity and progress depend on
the people of one nation's knowing and under-
standing the character and the essential interest
of others.

Let us hope that thinking men see and feel
that patriotism is not enough. If after this
war one great body of my countrymen or of
yours, believes persistently in seclusive nation-
alism, they will be forced by the rest who believe
in rational internationalism. I know that inter-
national socialism broke down under the impact
of militarism and deceit, and I am not advo-
cating socialism ; I am not decrying decent open-
minded patriotism. I am saying that patriotism
is not enough; I am saying that we belie the
times, we do not see what the man in the work-
shop feels, we are blind to the humanizing ef-
fect of this horribly unhuman war, if we think
we can or should proceed to draw a line through
the Atlantic ocean and recognize the political
fact of the American republic and the political
facts of British and French states as the only

82 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

existing realities. My conviction is that if the
upper classes, the educated and book-reading
classes, cherish the principles of patriotic ex-
clusive nationalism and nourish the idea that
the state is the only reality deserving devotion,
they will cut themselves off from the impulses
of the masses of working people who are not
devoted to national aggrandizement or national
glory, and who take, perhaps, lamentably little
pride in purely national grandeur, but have a
deep feeling for the necessity of human rights
and human progress. As far as international-
ism is possible and sound and righteous, I do
not like to imagine that it is to be the possession
of the unlettered alone, or that those having po-
litical authority, education, and economic well-
being will also not see the truth. In my judg-
ment, we must look out and beyond and realize
that this war has brought millions of men to
speak in the terms, not of national aggrandize-
ment, but of human rights.^

As I say all this, I pause in fear. The war
can raise democracy to a new level ; the war can

* In these days, when the failure of German socialism to
live up to its theories is so clear, there is strong feeling in the
minds of many men against internationalism because the word
had been the plaything of the Socialists. I hold no brief for
socialistic internationalism. I simply maintain that the inter-
ests of the world are too nearly one to endure grasping and
essentially selfish and self-centered patriotism.

BRITISH-AMERICAN RELATIONS 83

banish narrow-souled, mole-eyed provincialism ;
the war can bring in new life and hope for men
who fain would live in friendliness, nnthreat-
ened and unafraid, only if Germany is beaten,
or if she beats with her own recreated better
self the foul spirit of militaristic despotism
which menaces the world and sears her own soul.
And so let us not look too brightly forward;
first let us win on the battle field our right to
live in friendliness in a world of peace.

There is no complete wisdom in our fondling
our hopes with overmuch assurance. There
are some things which we might as well look in
the face. Half a century ago Prussia cast Aus-
tria out of Germany — I was about to say out of
Europe — and bade her be content with her job,
which in faith was big enough, of holding and
ruling various uneasy nationalities in the Eu-
ropean east. It is only an exaggeration to
think of Austria-Hungary as an oriental state,
though she did not extend her dominion and
exercise her power totally by Asiatic methods.
To-day Germany has subjected Austria; and
Germany reaches out and beyond — across Bul-
garia and Turkey on into Mesopotamia, and
over the territory of Western Russia. The na-
tions that stand in her way are to be crushed
out or submerged, if Pan-Germanism has its

84 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

will. Some of the appearances of sovereignty
and independence may remain in the semi-vas-
sal states that now are her allies. On the other
hand, those nationalities of the near east claim-
ing a right to think and live independently can
take their choice : either be expatriated, driven
into the open places of North Africa, or become
the hewers of wood and the drawers of water
for the lords of the new vast domain with its
headquarters in Potsdam.

The principles on which the new imperium is
to rest I call oriental, not European. You may
say I exaggerate ; possibly I do. You may say
all Germany wants is economic opportunity and
a corridor to the east ; I hope that is all. I hope
I am wrong if I see Germany cutting herself off
from Europe and setting up an Asiatic im-
perium. I am, moreover, willing, nay, anxious,
to admit that this new antique Asiatic despot-
ism, if established, would find hard work in over-
coming the tendencies of democracy and over-
coming the life and the spirit of the subject na-
tions. But you know, that the military clique,
the present masters of Germany, intend to be
the rulers in reality of that vast dominion, and
that in their opposition to any sentimental re-
gard for oppressed nationalities they are fer-
vently bitter. You know that they have de-

BRITISH-AMERICAN RELATIONS 85

veloped a political and social philosophy which
sanctifies conquest and deifies tyranny. You
know they are at least partly responsible for
Armenian extermination, and probably for the
process of annihilation now in progress in Ser-
bia. You know that some hundreds of pro-
fessors have signed a document which not only
justifies conquest but denies the right of the
conquered people to any share in the govern-
ment of the empire. You know that this process
of expansion will necessarily be based on brute
force and be saturated with the most vulgar ma-
terialism, and that the dominion must develop
all of the most odious processes of imperialism
because its purpose is to hold subject nations
in a condition of servitude. You know that
there are or have been two parties in Germany,
one determined by hook or by crook to acquire
an eastern imperium, the other hanging on to
the Occident and still hoping not to be estranged
entirely from the west in policy, politics, or
economy. You know that just now the eastern
party holds the whip hand. Let us pray that
it is riding to a fall.

In 1913 a colleague of mine heard a concourse
of intellectual people in Berlin applaud with en-
thusiasm an orator — a professor, I believe —
who announced his abhorrence for ParlmneM-

86 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

tismuSj Presse, and PoeheL Parliamentary gov-
ernment, the newspaper and the populace, these
are the foundations of occidental civilization.
Can any one doubt that Germany stands at the
parting of the ways, or is already well along tO'
orientalism, lured like the seaman of old by the
riches of Araby and India I

Well, suppose one small portion of this comes
true — suppose Germany holds in her grip west-
em Russia and reaches out from Potsdam that
mailed fist to squeeze her vassals in the near
east and Asia Minor, where shall America
stand! With what is left of occidentalism in
Europe? Or shall we say it is no concern of
ours; France can rebuild her own villages, if
she can find the fragments ; and as for England,
what have we to do with the creator of parlia-
mentary government? Plainly enough, in the
presence of defeat or of victim, the English-
speaking peoples must defend and build up the
principles of occidental civilization.

All this, you may say, is but a nightmare.
Possibly there is no foundation for fear. And
by referring to Pan-Germanism as oriental, one
may appear to do injustice to the orient, for the
present orient has been quickened by occidental
liberty. I would not for the world cast asper-
sions on Japan, in whose intelligence and out-

BRITISH-AMERICAN RELATIONS 87

look I have faith. I mean the ancient oriental-
ism. I mean those tenets and principles of do-
minion and of empire-building which the old
faded empires followed. To call the doctrines
of Pan-Germanism medieval would be the gross-
est flattery. Pan-Germanism may fail, beaten
in Germany itself, too retroactive, too much
out of joint, to stand the normal repulsions of
conscientious decency. But it is the domineer-
ing Pan-German whom we face, — there is the
alternative: between occidentalism and the old
tawdry empires of cruelty and despotism.

If this war ends with armaments undimin-
ished, with alliances that are practically great
Roman empires bristling with bayonets, if an-
cient orientalism stalks abroad in Europe, where
is America to stand! Alone? Are we to fear
Britain on our northern border and take respon-
sibility for the restless republics southward to
the Horn ? ^ If the war ends in hostility and
preparedness between nations — which may God
forbid — can there be anything wiser than the
actual structure by cooperation of the *^ Anglo-
Saxon block,'* which Germany had determined
to demolish? If, on the other hand, the war

* By this is not meant that America must under all circum-
stances take responsibility for Central and South America, but
that in an armed world responsibility of a semi-military char-
acter may be a necessity.

88 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

ends witli a peace of peoples, the responsibility
rests with Britain and America in friendly co-
operation to make it real and abiding. I want
to preach a community of responsibility which,
if it be real, if it be democratic, if it be whole-
some, must rest on generosity and freedom, not
on dictation. History would seem to offer some
hope that the principles of liberalism which
Britain has displayed on an imperial scale, may
be the cement of nations, the binding principle
of international good fellowship as it has been
of empire, and that the ethics of democracy,
which have been so eloquently spoken by Presi-
dent Wilson, may be accepted as the basis of a
peaceful world.

Irrespective of all identity of interest because
of common origins, one simple hard fact stands
plainly before us. Britain is the nation with
which America has the most intimate physical
relations, the territory of one great common-
wealth of the Empire borders ours on the north
for three thousand miles. Moreover, in the
Caribbean Sea there are extensive British pos-
sessions and strong outposts for the British
navy. Her interests there demand protection,
especially so if we also consider that the canal
route is for her and her constituent common-
wealths a matter of much consequence. The

BRITISH-AMERICAN RELATIONS 89

two nations may watch each other suspiciously
and stand ready to attribute every word or act
as evidence of greed and hostility ; or they may
see that the interests of the two peoples are in-
timate and mutually supporting. For America
and England to quarrel over the conditions and
prospects in the Caribbean would be the apoth-
eosis of folly ; nothing contributory to the actual
benefit of either could be detrimental to the in-
terests of the other. Both are interested in a
free open canal; both are really interested in
the prosperity and productivity of the region.
It is more than possible, however, that sus-
picions may arise and wax into hostilities; if
they do, it will be because one nation or both act
and appear to act on the old basis of selfishness,
a selfishness which will not in actuality be self-
interest, but short-sightedness. If they do not
become enemies, it will be because the peoples
abandon the old-time futile and senseless idea
that, for economic profit and for a vague thing
called patriotic grandeur and glory, political
domination and possession are necessary. Ger-
many's economic progress and intellectual in-
fluence, great as they were, might have been
much greater, had she abandoned, instead of ag-
gressively worshipping the idol of political
overlordship and the forcible extension of her

90 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

authority. Has this great war disclosed to ns
the fact that such mistaken ideas are destructive
of civilization and are a relic of the time when
the glory of a monarch and his riches depended
on the extent of his dominions and on the num-
ber from whom he could extort taxes and raise
soldiers? Certainly to a very great extent the
peace and good understanding between Britain
and America depend on a frank, open-hearted
and intelligent recognition of the mutuality of
interests in the Western Hemisphere.

President Wilson has proposed no less idea
than the establishment of the Monroe Doctrine
of the world. What does that mean? It means,
not British or American or Anglo-Saxon im-
perialistic control, but the right of a nation to
live freely and to be protected from political and
industrial exploitation. It means that the
stronger must help and protect, not dominate
and exhaust, the weak. It means all possible
emphasis on the friendliness of nations and the
community of interests. But it does not mean
isolation and contrariety; it cannot and should
not mean spheres of influence, by which is meant
places for economic manipulation ; it means self-
determination, but not seclusion or exclusion.

If Great Britain and America, acting in this
spirit, striving to give expression and greater

BRITISH-AMERICAN RELATIONS 91

reality to actual international solidarity, can
create the Monroe Doctrine of the world, then
all past achievements will seem as tinsel, save
as they prepared that consummation. Let no
one cite history to refute me. History, which
is not a basket of pebbles but a course of hu-
man growth, never before saw a world of men
crushed by the same weight of anxiety, think-
ing the same thoughts, reading the same news.
Until some fifty years ago this earth had not
seen hundreds of millions of men and women
that could even read and write. I do not expect
the millennium; but I do expect a changed
world, and I do expect that the English-speak-
ing peoples, with no sense of superior and ex-
clusive culture, but with a profound conviction
of duty growing out of their own past, will unite
in feeling and in interest to play an honorable,
helpful and civilizing role in the world at large.
**This ideal of an organized, free coopera-
tive basis for the future Society of Nations,
which would have appeared chimerical before
the war, is so no longer, though many genera-
tions will elapse before it will be in full work-
ing order. The interesting point is that in the
British Empire, which I prefer to call (from its
principal state) the British Commonwealth of
Nations, this transition from the old legalistic

92 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

idea of political sovereignty based on force, to
the new social idea of constitutional freedom,
based on consent, has been gradually evolving
for more than a century. And the elements of
the future world Government, which will no
longer rest on the imperial ideas adopted from
the Roman law, are already in operation in our
commonwealth of nations and will rapidly de-
velop in the near future. As the Roman ideas
guided European civilization for almost two
thousand years, so the newer ideas embedded
in the British constitutional and colonial system
may, when carried to their full development,
guide the future civilization for ages to come."
Who spoke those words! Some book-read
philosophic dreamer, carefully shielded from
harsh reality? Some wordy British orator,
seeking to exalt and magnify political authority
and split the ears of the groundlings? Some
self-satisfied islander, boasting of insular
achievement? None of these, but a general,
openly acknowledged as skillful, brave and re-
sourceful ; not a Briton at all, but a Boer, who
less than twenty years ago was leading the
armies of the Transvaal against the armies of
Britain; not an orator by profession, but a man
of affairs, who, having crushed the German
armies in Africa, came to England as the repre-

BRITISH-AMERICAN RELATIONS 93

sentative of free South Africa to consult on the
needs and duties of the empire.

General Smuts of South Africa, resting his
hope on what has been done, looks forward to
a world built on the principle of cooperation
and freedom. This is democracy as a principle
of world order; the principle of self -develop-
ment strengthened by companionship. This is
an extension of the spirit of democracy till it
forms the essence of international relationship.
Will any of us cynically hold back and deny
our own selves in the wider currents of the
world? Those that think it all a dream may be
right; but please do not quote history to estab-
lish your position. Only a few decades ago this
world was a serf -holding, slave-holding, slave-
trading world. Only two centuries or so ago
religious liberty was almost unknown, and the
claims for its acceptance were considered blas-
phemous immorality.^ The mills of the gods do
not always grind slowly.

* It is quite impossible of course to say where the principle
of religious liberty was adopted in the New World or the Old.
No one would venture to say before 1650, and it might be safer
even for America to say the last quarter of the 18th Century.
But any one clinging to the delusion that international hos-
tility built on a misconception of actual interest, is bound to be
maintained permanently because of the warring character of
national sovereignty since the establishment of national states,
will profit by considering the course of the development of
religious liberty.

THE MONROE DOCTRINE

THE MONROE DOCTRINE

The history of the Monroe Doctrine is a long
and complicated story. It is so because it con-
tains within itself a very large portion of the
diplomatic history of the United States. It is
all the niore intricate and intangible because
it is not a distinct, clearly defined, legal princi-
ple, but a policy based on historical experience,
and, in addition, an attitude of mind and a senti-
ment, a sentiment often crudely expressed and
often doubtless of uncertain significance in the
mind of the average man, but nevertheless very
real and very actual.

To understand it at all we shall have to look
first at its earlier expression and its broader
bearing. As we carry the story forward we
shall see, I think, an interesting historical proc-
ess— to put it briefly, we shall see the breaking
away from Europe and the implication and con-
sequence of the most significant fact, and in the
end, after a hundred and forty years of more or
less complete separation, the return of the
United States to Europe. This return, however,

97

98 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

was not that of a repentant prodigal. The
United States and a large portion of Latin
America have come to Europe with power and
with a proposal that Europe herself accept the
principle of a rejuvenated, enlarged, wholesome
doctrine still bearing the name of the fifth presi-
dent of the United States.

From the time of the discovery of the West-
em world till the United States was established
as a separate nation, the American continents
were stakes in the game of European diplomacy
and maneuvering for power. It may possibly
be unwise to go as far as Professor Seeley in
his fascinating little book. The Expansion of
England, and explain all developments of Brit-
ish and French hostilities from the accession
of William and Mary to the downfall of Na-
poleon as due to rivalry for America and trade
in America ; but there is certainly no exaggera-
tion in saying that in all or nearly all of the con-
troversies of western Europe, the desire for
possessions in America or the control of Amer-
ican trade had a large share. As far as British
history and British policy alone are concerned,
this is notably true from the time of John Haw-
kins and Francis Drake.

When the United States became independent,
a change was wrought in European politics. The

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 99

territory, covered by the new nation, which
reached from the Atlantic coast westwards to
the Mississippi, was no longer the property of
a European nation; its development was no
longer immediately affected by the decisions or
the ambitions of a mother country ; it could not
very well be considered merely a pawn in the
play of European rivalries. This new nation
might conceivably, if it so chose, enter the game
itself and become engrossed and entangled in
the hereditary controversies of Europe, or it
might hold studiously aloof, refusing to take
part in the diplomatic enterprises or antipathies
of the Old World. But, it is obvious, if the
United States were to be really independent, it
must have the opportunity to live its own life,
or — to say the same thing in a different way —
if it would lead its own life and shape its own
destiny, it must keep from the burdens, the ani-
mosities and the rivalries of Europe. To the ex-
tent that the United States freed itself from Eu-
ropean irritations and limitations it became in-
dependent and self-determining. Such state-
ments appear too self-evident to need announce-
ment, but they underlie the history of the Mon-
roe Doctrine ; their acceptance is necessary for
any proper consideration of American diplo-
macy, and possibly I should say of European

100 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

diplomacy also. When European politics was
no longer complicated by the presense of ambi-
tion for American dominion, and when America
was cut free from the policies of Europe, the
political world entered upon a stage essentially
different from that in which it had been moving
from the day when Columbus came sailing back
out of the Sea of Darkness announcing that he
had found a new route to the riches of the east.^
In the first decade or two after our Revolu-
tion, there was insufficient appreciation in Eu-
rope of the fact that the United States had really
become a distinct nation, and as a matter of
fact there was not full appreciation in America.
We were looked upon as a sort of strange out-
cast, this new nation on a new continent pre-
tending to put into practise disagreeable and
wholly illusory principles of government. It
was hard for the Old World to treat the upstart
with the customary superficial courtesy of

^ For the purpose of making the position plain, I have pos-
sibly allowed myself exaggeration in the paragraphs above.
But no one can well exaggerate the importance to the United
States of actual separation from Europe if the country would
be really independent. Of course — and this thought follows
naturally in the pages that follow — the fuller and more nearly
complete change came when the Spanish and Portugese col-
onies in Central and South America became independent, and
when the United States asserted that those states too were
free from the policies of Europe and from the intrigues of
European diplomacy. One of the most telling and eloquent
passages in the speeches of Richard Cobden presents the benef-
icent effect on Europe of the freedom of America.

THE MONROE DOCTBlNE 101

studied diplomacy. Even America was shaken
for years by contentions growing ont of Euro-
pean politics and did not immediately slough
off the sense of colonialism. Washington, as
usual looking facts full in the face, saw the sim-
ple sense of the thing. Writing as early as 1788
to Sir Edward Newenham, he said: *^I hope the
United States of America will be able to keep
disengaged from the labyrinth of European pol-
itics and wars.'^ John Adams, a sturdy Ameri-
can, told Oswald even in 1782 that he was afraid
of the new states being made tools of Europe.

The outbreak of the war between England and
France in 1783 gave opportunity for an exposi-
tion of American independence ; and the United
States, under the guidance of Washington,
Hamilton and Jefferson, took a position which
was of immense consequence for the succeed-
ing years. The treaty of alliance that had been
made with France some years before furnished
perplexities ; and France, sending a Minister to
America, proceeded to act as though we were to
be used as she saw fit. Then it was that Wash-
ington issued his proclamation of neutrality
which, enlarged by contemporaneous legislation,
may almost be looked on as the beginning of
modern principles of the duties and responsibili-
ties of neutral nations. Our government had no

102^ AMERICA AND BRITAIN

intention of being embroiled in the European
conflict, though the people of the United States
were soon divided into bitterly contending fac-
tions known as the British and French factions.
The belief that we must stand clear of Euro-
pean entanglements, and must live our own life,
soon became general, however; for the average
American felt that his country had a character
and a purpose different from that of the Old
World. Jefferson, writing to our representative
in Spain (1792), said: ^^With respect to their
government, or policy, as concerning themselves
or other nations, we wish not to intermeddle in
word or deed, and that it be not understood that
our government permits itself to entertain
either a will or an opinion on the subject. '' A
short time later he wrote to another, *^We have
a perfect horror at everything linking ourselves
with the politics of Europe.'' Washington's
Farewell Address, which was intended in part
to express disapproval of factious disturbances
in America, pointed clearly to the necessity of
our maintaining ourselves in a position of posi-
tive independence free from European compli-
cations : ^* Europe has a set of primary interests
which to us have none or a very remote relation.
Hence she must be engaged in frequent contro-
versies, the causes of which are essentially for-

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 103

eign to our concerns. . . . Why forgo the ad-
vantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit
our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why,
by interweaving our destiny with that of any
part of Europe, entangle our peace and pros-
perity in the toils of European ambition, rival-
ship, interest or caprice/'

''It is our true policy to steer clear of perma-
nent alliances with any portion of the foreign
world, so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty
to do it ; for let me not be understood as capable
of patronizing infidelity to existing engage-
ments. I hold the maxim no less applicable to
public than to private affairs, that honesty is
the best policy. I repeat it, therefore let those
engagements be observed in their genuine sense.
But in my opinion it is unnecessary and would
be unwise to extend them.*'

If any one could be more explicit on this sub-
ject than George Washington it was Thomas
Jefferson who came to the presidential chair
just at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Washington and Hamilton might see and did
see the wisdom, the practical necessity, of main-
taining America's freedom from European pol-
icy; they might and did see the necessity of
America's occupying a position of dignified

104 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

aloofness. But to Jefferson this attitude was
more than a matter of calculated wisdom; his
sentiments, his inmost feelings, prompted him
to turn from Europe, all its wars and all its in-
herited problems, policies and perplexities, to
the new life of the young nation whose destinies
were in its own hands and who could, if it would,
lead a life of freedom and take advantage of op-
portunities never before offered a people to
press forward toward a better, simpler and hap-
pier existence. This whole-hearted enthusiasm
for the future America, this sense of distinct
opportunity and distinct destiny, this continu-
ous consciousness of America's having broken
away from the ills and burdens of Europe, was
an essential portion of Jeffersonism. No one
familiar with American history is likely to be
blind to the influence of Jefferson; but he was
influential, after all is said, because he embodied
in himself the native aspirations, the impulses
and the emotional reactions of the great masses
of the plain people. They had broken away
from Europe ; they looked forward with buoyant
hopes; they looked westward across the conti-
nent not eastward across the Atlantic. Jeffer-)
son's aversion to what was essentially Euro-
pean was typical ; it but expressed the growing

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 105

sense of the people. The words of his first in-
augural address, one of America's great state
documents, may appear naive and unsophisti-
cated ; but Jefferson was neither. He speaks of
being '* Kindly separated by nature and a wide
ocean from the exterminating havoc of one-
quarter of the globe ; too high-minded to endure
the degradations of others, possessing a chosen
country,'' etc.

If we remember that no other man in Ameri-
can history, except Lincoln, so thoroughly im-
pressed himself on the mind of the people, and
if we remember that to-day, after the passing
of a century and more, the people of many sec-
tions of the country refer to Jefferson almost as
they would to the scriptures, and perhaps quote
him more frequently and correctly, we shall get
some idea of how firmly the American believed
that European ways were not our ways nor
European burdens our burdens. *'We should
be most unwise, indeed," he wrote in 1803,
**were we to cast away the singular blessings of
the position in which nature has placed us, the
opportunity she has endowed us with of pur-
suing, at a distance from the foreign conten-
tions, the paths of industry, peace, and happi-
ness, of cultivating general friendship, and of

106 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

bringing collisions of interest to the umpirage
of reason rather than foree.^

When the great territory of Louisiana was se-
cretly ceded by Spain to France in 1800, a new
situation presented itself. News of the cession
caused excitement in America. This excitement
was perhaps chiefly due to the fear in the minds
of the western men, the inhabitants of the east-
em half of the Mississippi Valley, that the great
river would be permanently closed to American
commerce; but there were also misgivings at
the thought that a powerful nation, like France,
might once more obtain vast territories in
America. This possibly was the beginning of
opposition to the notion, still firmly implanted
in the American mind, that the continents of
America are to be parceled out and distributed
by treaty and barter among the nations of Eu-
rope— an unworthy sentiment you may think, if
it has not prevented America in one way or an-
other from annexing territory and people, but
a real sentiment nevertheless. Had the Amer-
icans known the grand schemes, which soon

* The course of Jefferson's administration (1801-1809) was
marked by effort to keep the United States out of the European
conflict and to carry out his theories concerning the folly of
war. He made on the whole, a noble struggle, and it is one of
the strange ironies or mishaps of history, that Madison, his
successor and disciple, finally had to lead America into the
conflict and to add her feeble strength to that of Napoleon.

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 107

found lodgment in the mind of Napoleon, to take
possession of a large part of Central and South
America, one of those schemes of a world-em-
pire which make even the dreams of Pan-Ger-
many seem less fanciful and damnable than they
are, there might w^ell have been, in the early
years of the nineteenth century, still greater
objection than there was to the development of
a French colonial empire. This particular dan-
ger was, however, avoided ; in 1803 France ceded
Louisiana to the United States, and in 1812 we
were fighting against Britain, fighting the foes
of Napoleon.

The uprising of the Spanish people against
Napoleon in May, 1808, is an epochal fact in Eu-
ropean and American history. The French em-
peror was face to face with aroused nationalism,
but the uprising threatened more than the exten-
sion of despotic power in Europe; it produced
the speedy dissolution of the Spanish empire.
Soon the Spanish dominions in America were
in revolt; one by one the states of South and
Central America were engaged in revolution,
and one by one as the years went by they suc-
ceeded in maintaining their independence. It
is needless to remark on the momentous signifi-
cance of the disruption of the massive empire
which at one time encircled the globe. It is

108 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

noteworthy that Jefferson wrote as early as
1811, referring especially to West Florida:
^*The United States could not see without seri-
ous inquietude, any part of a neighboring terri-
tory, in which they have, in different respects,
so deep and so just a concern, pass from the
hands of Spain into those of any other foreign
power." This was an early statement of the
doctrine or belief that the United States had an
immediate and primary interest in the passing
of Spanish American territory into other hands,
though of course West Florida was contiguous
territory in which we had far more than senti-
mental interest.

As these southern revolutionary governments
acquired a certain amount of stability, there
arose the question of recognition by the United
States ; but no definite step in that direction was
taken until 1821. In 1822 a representative from
Colombia was received, and soon after a num-
ber of other states were thus formally recog-
nized. On the whole we had been exceedingly
cautious. We might naturally have misgivings
about the permanence and stability of these new
commonwealths ; for the people had had no such
preparation for the tasks and burdens of gov-
ernment as the English colonists had when they
broke away from the mother country. Still rec-

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 109

ognition was necessary and wise; and it fur-
nished the basis for the proclamation of Mon-
roe, which forms the main topic of this paper.

From this brief story of our recognizing the
South American states as members of the family
of nations, must not be omitted the popular in-
terest and enthusiasm in the United States over
the new-found liberty and independence of these
South American neighbors. There was joy over
each new soul that repented and entered what
was fondly imagined to be the Eden of demo-
cratic government.

But meanwhile events had taken place in Eu-
rope which were to have effect on American con-
ditions and policies. The Old World had ac-
cepted the Metternich principle of ^'legiti-
macy,'* which on its positive side meant obedi-
ence to an established monarchical government,
and on its repressive side meant the beating
down of popular intrusion upon the sacred right
and power of the crown; all mankind must be
kept closely confined within the limits set by
autocratic government. The Holy Alliance, as
it is popularly called, was an international union
or understanding of the most rigid and deter-
mined character. Its beginning was in a docu-
mentary statement of principles drawn up at
Paris, September 26, 1815, a few months after

110 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

the overtlirow of Napoleon, the arch enemy of
European dignity, the disturber of placid, legiti-
mate autocracy. The avowals of this memor-
able document are of a very moral, or at least
of a highly religious, character: **The policy
of the powers, in their mutual relations, ought
to be guided by the sublime truths taught by
the eternal religion of God our Savior," . , .
and . . . *^the precepts of that holy religion, the
precepts of justice, charity and peace." . , .
Considering themselves all as members of one
great Christian nation, the three allied princes
look upon themselves as delegates of Providence
called upon to govern three branches of the
same family, viz., Austria, Russia and Prussia,"
It is an interesting and curious fact that this
holy religious alliance, supposed to embody the
will of divine Providence, was entered into by
one state which was the home of thoroughly
solidified Roman Catholicism, by another which
was the center and power of the Orthdox Greek
Church and by a third which was predominately
Protestant. The pious, solemn, religious tone
and temper of the document was attributable
to the strange mystical spirit of the Russian
Czar, and he was doubtless quite sincere and
quite earnest in his sense of religious obliga-
tion.

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 111

In these latter days when we are thinking and
speaking so seriously of a league of nations and
of a world organization based on justice, this
old, pitiful, narrow-souled Holy Alliance some-
times gives us pause. Are we too setting up as
eternal and unchangeable and as a principle to
which we dedicate our souls, a mere subjective
doctrine which, a hundred years from now, will
appear childish, rigid, unadapted to human
needs, profitless? But there are vast differ-
ences between the spirit of the Holy Alliance
and that of the present: the old alliance was
based on the theory of divine right and abso-
lute government; the new proposed league of
peace is based on the principle of self-deter-
mination and democracy. The old wished to
perpetuate what the passing years had already
nearly demolished, it was already decadent ; the
new seeks to establish more firmly principles
that certainly are not dying but entering into
new vigor. The old, fondling principles of jus-
tice and right, sprang not from the hearts of
peoples, but from the crowned heads of absolute
monarchs ; the new is based on a recognition of
broad popular needs, on the cravings of human-
ity. That in times gone by, alliances, pious
manifestoes, balances of power, congresses of
nations, concerts of Europe and the like, have

112 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

proved ineffective and nnliiiman, is an argument
in behalf of higher and better effort, an evi-
dence of a need and a duty, rather than proof
that no international arrangement is desirable
or possible. History may well make us cau-
tious and doubtful of the plenitude of our wis-
dom; it may make us confident that no regime
has the qualities of perfect and unchanging sta-
bility; but to use the failings of the past as an
argument against effort for the future is to
argue for placid acceptance of everything and
the hopelessness of human endeavor. To argue
thus would be no wiser than to put up with the
** divine right'* of kings, the immobility of au-
thority, the invincibility of legitimacy, and the
impossibility of extending human rights and
welfare.

Two months after the formation of the Holy
Alliance, an agreement was made between Great
Britain, Prussia, Russia and Austria to act to-
gether in the management or control of Euro-
pean affairs, and a few years later France was
admitted to the combination. The purpose of
the arrangements announced at the Congress of
Aix-la-Chapelle was to preserve the peace of
the world. It was declared to have **no other
object than the maintenance of peace and the
guarantee of those transactions on which the

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 113

peace was founded and consolidated. . . . The
repose of the world will be constantly our mo-
tive.'^ In 1821 this Alliance announced that
they had ^ ^ taken all of the people of Europe into
their holy keeping and that in the future, all
useful and necessary changes in the legislation
and administration of states must emanate
alone from the free will, the reflected and en-
lightened impulse of those whom God has ren-
dered responsible for power.''

A break came in 1822; Britain, though then
largely influenced by the semi-reactionary
forces, which the long struggle against Revolu-
tionary France and the Napoleonic empire had
strengthened, was out of place in a combination
of pious, hard-hearted, divine monarchs and
wily ministers, whose main object in life was
to crush out every symptom of popular unrest
and stamp upon every tendency to liberal gov-
ernment. Wellington, the British representa-
tive at the Congress of Verona, refused, under
instructions, to sign the extraordinary pro-
nouncement of that body, — and no wonder, un-
less all sense of English political liberty had
been lost; for the Allies announced their in-
tention to put an end to the system of repre-
sentative government in whatever country it
might exist in Europe; they were convinced

114 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

that such a system was ^*as incompatible with
the monarchical principles as the maxim of the
sovereignty of the people with the divine right. ' '
They promised to suppress liberty of the press
and ^^to sustain, in their respective states, those
measures which the clergy may adopt with the
aim of ameliorating their own interests, so in-
timately connected with the preservation of the
authority of Princes, *' inasmuch as the prin-
ciples of religion contribute most powerfully to
maintain passive obedience.

Before and after the treaty of Verona, words
were transmuted into action. Austria over-
threw the parliamentarians in Naples, and
crushed a revolution in Piedmont. French
forces moved into Spain and won a victory for
legitimacy, and a like action in Portugal would
have been taken probably, had not England an-
nounced that she would use her power to pre-
vent it. Curiously enough, Greek troubles gave
in reality the quietus to the unholy effort of
the pious combination of legitimate sovereigns.
Did the principle of legitimacy santify the
power of the unspeakable Turk, and must the
combined powers smother the Greek revolt as
they had smothered the revolutions of Italy
and Spain? Such consistency was too much for
the tender, governmental and commercial con-

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 115

sciences of the holy monarchs ; and so the Brit-
ish, French and Russian ships of war beat back
the Turk, and the independence of Greece was
established.

This brief presentation of European condi-
tions serves as a background for the Monroe
Doctrine and for American opinion. Imagine,
if you can, the sentiments and the resentments
of Adams, Clay, and Webster, of the old Jeffer-
son, the writer of the Declaration of Independ-
ence, of Madison, not improperly called the
Father of the Federal Constitution, and of
James Monroe. Imagine the feelings of the
main body of the American people, who were
just then coming into the full heritage of the
new continent and enjoying the sweets of politi-
cal controversy and an unlicensed press. We
are sometimes amused at the American patriotic
fervor of those decades, at the people's exulta-
tion and exaltation, at their pride and self-con-
fidence, at their assurance that they had the bet-
ter part and the true life, at their feeling that
they, separated from the 'degradations'' of
Europe, were thrice blessed and were smiled
upon by the God who cared for human freedom
and justice. But we need not be surprised that,
for decades to come, American destiny and the
precepts of a boastful democracy were cher-

116 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

ished with a passionate devotion by a people
daily gathering strength and, with astonishing
rapidity, changing the wilderness into farms
and villages.

But the statesmen of America knew that des-
potic repression was not confined, if the Holy
Alliance had its way, to Europe alone. The
European allies were seriously contemplating
the overthrow of the new Latin- American gov-
ernments; and in 1822 and 1823, the dispatch
of a French fleet and army to South America
appeared' not improbable. Fortunately for her
own reputation and fortunately for mankind
Britain was opposed to this enterprise; and for-
tunately too the British foreign office was in
the hands of a man of whom it has been said
that *^He was the first English statesman to
realize the future power of the United States
and the value to England of a good understand-
ing.'' ^ George Canning was prepared to take
a determined stand against the intrusion of the
allied powers in American affairs. Those that
wish to credit the British position to a cunning
recognition of the advantages gained by Brit-
ish trade in the free states of the new world,
and those wishing to see in Canning's states-
manship mere hostility to French power, may,

* The Monroe Doctrine, by A. B. Hart, p. 49.

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 117

as far as I am concerned, cherish their beliefs.
But I prefer to believe that British democracy
was too far advanced to promote tyranny, how-
ever blessed by the name legitimacy, and I pre-
fer to see in Canning a man with insight, out-
look and breadth of vision.
', / We must now turn to Russia and see Ameri-
can relations with that country. In doing this,
we must remember that Russia was not only
one of the leaders of autocratic repression of
popular government, but also an American
power with considerable territory in the north-
west and with even larger pretensions. In the
interviews between the Russian minister at
Washington and John Quincy Adams, Monroe's
Secretary of State, we find a delightful antith-
esis of interests and of principles. Adams
was a seasoned diplomat, entirely American,
thoroughly equipped by training and native
ability for any emergency in diplomacy, un-
afraid and unabashed. He could be haughty,
severe, direct and, if need be, abrupt, and he was
not at all likely to be overawed by the assumed
superiority of the august representative of the
mighty, though religious, head of all the Rus-
sias. In these various interviews we find Adams
outlining, with a precision which the Russian
minister could understand, that the American

118 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

continents were no longer open to European
colonization. ^*I told him specially,'* wrote
Adams, "that we should contest the right of
Russia to any territorial establishment on this
continent, and that we should assume distinctly
the principle that the American continents are
no longer subject to any new European colonial
establishments." The Russian minister em-
phatically announced that his country was de-
voted to the political principles of the allied
powers, and he declared those principles to be
*Hhat power of union and agreement which in
our times has created a new political system, —
a new phase of European civilization — a policy
whose object is simply to assure the peace of all
states which compose the civilized world. '' (No-
vember, 1823.)

The situation was a trying one and not de-
void of serious danger. Russia, as we have said,
was an American power, setting up claims to a
vast territory from the Arctic Ocean as far
south as the 51st parallel; and in addition she
affirmed, with obvious application to the new
Spanish republics, the principles of the Holy
Alliance, the principles of despotic government.
Indeed, the minister's words, if taken literally,
might well arouse the suspicion that the institu-
tions of the United States, hostile as they were

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 119

in spirit to the political system of Europe, —
this **new phase of European civilization'' —
should be swept out of existence. The objec-
tionable doctrine of the equality of man and his
right to self-government had been left too long
to poison the air and fill the minds of the Euro-
pean populace with visions of liberty. The dis-
cussions with Russia form, therefore, an essen-
tial portion of the antecedents of the Monroe
Doctrine.

One further word must be said before we take
up the preparation and the significance of the
famous message of December, 1823; and that
word has to do with the position of Great Brit-
ain. That power still refrained from recog-
nizing the Latin- American states, but her with-
drawal from the Holy Alliance and her evident
dislike of its principles weakened the combina-
tion all but fatally. Canning did not believe
that the Spanish dominion in America could be
reestablished and he was willing, therefore, to
go some distance in letting the world know that
both the United States and Britain objected to
forcible intervention by outside powers with
intent to crush the new governments. In all
probability, the knowledge that Britain was at
least partly in sympathy aided the United
States and gave us additional confidence, though

120 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

we cannot see that Adams was deficient in cour-
age or counted at all on British support. The
principles that Adams cherished were strictly
American, and we need not wonder at his hesi-
tation in connecting American policy and pur-
pose with those of the country which until a
few months before had been a member of the
political system of Europe.

It was decided, therefore, that the announce-
ment should be made by the United States inde-
pendently, and it was to stand more than once
in the future as a bulwark against British de-
velopment in the New World. Adams char-
acteristically preferred a frank and independ-
ent statement rather than **to come in,'* as he
later said, **as a cock-boat in the wake of the
British man-of-war."

In the autumn of 1823 President Monroe was
anxious and alarmed. He consulted Jefferson
and Madison. There were various cabinet dis-
cussions, in the course of which we can in part
trace the formulation of the doctrine. Both
Jefferson and Madison were favorable to join-
ing with England, and both for stating the posi-
tion of the United States as the basis of free
institutions. Adams was laborious, clear-head-
ed, determined, and to him doubtless must be
attributed the real authorship of the doctrine,

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 121

though Monroe's influence is by no means negli-
gible. In one paper drawn by Adams, which
may be considered the protocol of the finished
message, occurs a paragraph that did not ap-
pear in the final draft ; but it rings so harmoni-
ously with modern pronouncements of interna-
tional relationship that it deserves reading in
full:

"1. That the institutions of Government, to be lawful,
must be pacific, that is, founded upon the consent, and by the
agreement of those who are governed; and 2. That each Nation
is the exclusive judge of the Government best suited to itself,
and that no other Nation, can justly interfere by force to im-
pose a different Government upon it. . The first of these prin-
ciples may be designated as the principle of Liberty — the
second as the principle of national Independence — they are both
Principles of Peace and of Good Will to Men."

Despite Adams's determination to let the Czar
know what the principles of democratic govern-
ment are, he objected to the President's indi-
cating that the internal affairs of the European
states were our concern. The declaration must
be American and must make clear that the west-
ern continents were no longer to be the play-
things of European politics or policy.

Monroe's message of December, 1823, con-
tains the formal statement of principles which
have ever since borne his name. After refer-
ring to proposals for settling the territorial
claims on the northwest coast, the President de-

122 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

clared that the occasion had arisen for assert-
ing **as a principle — that the American con-
tinents, by the free and independent condition
which they have assumed and maintain, are
henceforth not to be considered as subjects for
future colonization by any European Pow-

v3X o« • • •

Reference is then made to the efforts that had
been made in Spain and in Portugal to improve
the condition of the people. *^It need scarcely
be remarked that the result has been, so far,
very different from what was then anticipated.
Of events in that quarter of the globe with which
we have so much intercourse, and from which
we derive our origin, we have always been anx-
ious and interested spectators. The citizens of
the United States cherish sentiments the most
friendly in favor of the liberty and happiness
of their fellow-men on that side of the Atlantic.
In the wars of the European powers in mat-
ters relating to themselves we have never taken
any part, nor does it comport with our policy
to do so. It is only when our rights are in-
vaded or seriously menaced that we resist in-
juries or make preparation for our defense.'*

*'With the movements in this hemisphere we
are, of necessity, more immediately connected,
and by causes which must be obvious to all en-

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 123

lightened and impartial observers. The politi-
cal system of the allied powers is essentially
different in this respect from that of America.
This difference proceeds from that which ex-
ists in their respective governments. And to
the defense of our own, which has been achieved
by the loss of so much blood and treasure, and
matured by the wisdom of their most enlight-
ened citizens, and under which we have enjoyed
unexampled felicity, this whole nation is de-
voted.''

*^We owe it, therefore, to candor, and to the
amicable relations existing between the United
States and those powers, to declare that we
should consider any attempt on their part to
extend their system to any portion of this hemi-
sphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.
With the existing colonies or dependencies of
any European power we have not interfered and
shall not interfere. But with the governments
who have declared their independence, and
maintained it, and whose independence we have,
on great consideration and on great principles,
acknowledged, we could not view any interposi-
tion for the purpose of oppressing them, or con-
trolling in any other manner their destiny, by
any European power, in any other light than

124 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposi-
tion towards the United States/'

The message further calls attention to the
unsettled state of Europe, the interposition in
Spain, and the natural interest of the United
States in the question of how far this method of
political repression may be carried; the policy
of the United States has been continuously that
of not interfering with the internal concerns of
other powers, to cultivate friendly relations but
not to submit to injuries. ^^It is impossible that
the allied powers should extend their political
system to any portion of either continent with-
out endangering our peace and happiness. If
we look to the comparative strength and re-
sources of Spain and those new governments,
and their distance from each other, it must be
obvious that she can never subdue them. It is
still the policy of the United States to leave
the parties to themselves, in the hope that other
powers will pursue the same course."

For our present purpose, it is unnecessary
to discuss the effect of Monroe's announcement
upon the European chancelries. It is sufficient
to say that, on the continent, ministers grum-
bled and sneered at the impertinence of the pre-
sumptuous democracy that thought itself justi-
fied in dealing so boldly with a world problem.

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 125

In England, men received the news with expres-
sions of satisfaction ; and it was then that Can-
ning coined the famous phrase about calling in
the New World to redress the balance of the
Old. Britain has since that time on more than
one occasion claimed a paternal or at least an
avuncular interest in the statements of Monroe.
Let us now look a little more carefully at
Monroe's message to see what it contained or
implied and what it did not contain. This is
important because it formed the basis, as you
well know, of a real doctrine which accommo-
dated itself to the changing and developing de-
sire, impulse, or sentiment of the people, and
also, on the other hand, served to build up a
vague, though often powerful, national senti-
ment controlling and shaping our foreign pol-
icy. Plainly the message was based on the fact
that European principles of government, as ex-
emplified by the Holy Alliance, were not Ameri-
can, and that, as we did not interfere in Europe,
Europe should not interfere in the affairs of
the Western Hemisphere. It included the as-
sertion that the time had gone by when the New
World was open to occupation and colonization
by European powers; the western continents,
moreover, were cut loose from the strategy of
European intrigue and conflict. Up to this time

126 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

the United States had announced and practised
isolation, save that it had been driven into the
War of 1812; now inferentially at least the
whole Western Hemisphere must be considered
isolated from the broils of Europe. The mes-
sage evidently placed emphasis on the interests
and safety of the United States; it did not
merely cast the protecting arm of a stronger
brother about the weaker republics of the south.
The danger uppermost in Monroe's mind was
any effort of the Holy Alliance to set up and ex-
tend to America the political principles of Met-
ternich and Alexander. There were **two
spheres'' of political interest and political prin-
ciple, and, especially if we remember the atti-
tude of America preceding 1823, it inferentially
involved the avoidance of the tangled and de-
structive tendencies of European Politik.

Though it is not obvious in the exact words
of the document itself, and though Monroe prob-
ably did not intend to lay down the distinct doc-
trine that interference by one state with the
internal government of another was objection-
able, such an implication is easily attached to
the original declaration. We may find, there-
fore, in the moral basis of the message some
reason for making it cover the principle of na-
tional self-determination, of which so much is

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 127

said in these latter days. We may be at least
partly justified in believing that the framers of
the message objected to the battering down of
weak nations by the blows of a superior power
or a superior combination of powers. On the
whole, however, the message was chiefly con-
cerned with the separation of the New World
from the politics and controversies of Europe.

That the doctrine has for a hundred years
been a helpful force in the world, all students of
the doctrine heartily believe. The entangle-
ment of America in European rivalries would
have been unfortunate in the extreme. Aided
and protected in some measure by Monroe ^s
message and the sentiment which has been at-
tached to it, the South American republics have
been enabled to live their own lives and tread
the difficult and stony path leading to peace and
democratic order.

As the years went by after 1823, conditions
changed essentially. Even before Monroe wrote
his message, the Holy Alliance was on the verge
of collapse; by 1830 the governments of Eu-
rope were in no condition to force the principles
of divine right on the rest of the world; many
of them had internal troubles of their own ; the
democratic virus was spreading contagion in
Europe. Little by little, states became demo-

128 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

cratic, or semi-democratio, or put on the airs
and carried some of the outward semblances of
popular rule. To-day, Germany is the only
state in which the monarch openly flaunts in the
faces of his subjects his divine right and his di-
vine mission to rule. And so the Monroe Doc-
trine of the last fifty years has been necessarily
in some respects different from that of earlier
days. It has no longer the support of the two
spheres of political principles ; France is now a
democracy, and in 1823 it was France, presuma-
bly, to whom the allied powers intended to en-
trust the task of overthrowing the disobedient
southern republics and bringing them under the
yoke of Spain. Despite the changes in Europe,
the Monroe Doctrine, unless it has undergone
radical change since April, 1917, still objects to
the extension of European authority or in-
fluence to the American continents. Our gov-
ernment would, I suppose, object to the intru-
sion of France or any other European power
in the affairs of America and oppose the ac-
quisition of territory in the New World. This
sentiment of detachment, originally based on
differences of political principle and on the need
of distinguishing our primary interests from
those of Europe, has maintained itself despite
the growth of commercial communication with

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 129

Europe, despite intimate intellectual contacts
between European peoples and ourselves, and
despite the fact that, in time and in social in-
terest, we are nearer France and Britain than
we are to Brazil, Argentina or Chile.

Before attempting to explain the modem
Monroe Doctrine, it is well to take up one or
two other matters and to review hastily some of
the more important historical occurrences of
the last hundred years. In the first place, we
should notice that Monroe gave, neither ex-
plicitly nor impliedly, any pledge that we should
not extend our own territory in America.
Doubtless Adams's principles of national self-
determination would run counter to forcible
conquest. Yet Adams said in 1823, **It is
scarcely possible to resist the conviction that
the annexation of Cuba to our federal republic
will be indispensable to the continuance and in-
tegrity of the Union itself.'' We had, at that
time, just annexed the Floridas, and it was not
at all likely that the message was in any w^ay
intended to be a self-denying ordinance and pre-
clude peaceful acquisition of territory. Be-
fore long we annexed Texas (1845), the Mexican
war was begun, and by 1848 the territory of the
United States stretched across to the Pacific and

130 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

we had become a Pacific as well as an Atlantic
Power.

Whether Monroe's message involved the prin-
ciple of respect for small nations or not, the
time came, in the decades between 1840 and
1860, when America was in spirit imperialistic.
This sentiment had various ingredients ; it was
partly land-hunger, partly boastfulness and
sense of power, partly an idealistic belief that
American institutions must be extended, partly
only the old feeling of suspicion and hostility
toward other nations, — an unpleasant product
of that intense and exclusive nationalism which
characterized the nineteenth century. Before
1850, the sentiment of which we have spoken
was fully developed; it was not enough to ob-
ject to the extension of European '* principles;'*
not even by purchase, treaty or consent, was any
portion of the Western Hemisphere to be ac-
quired by a European power. Everything was
to remain in status quo, unless we changed it
by acquiring territory ourselves. The whole
flamboyant doctrine of America for the Ameri-
cans was quite naturally enunciated by Stephen
A. Douglas, of Illinois, ^^the Little Giant;" it
was a perfectly natural product of the politics
of the confident, self-satisfied, highly imagina-
tive, idealistic frontier, even if it was tainted

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 131

by mucli of the arrogance and tlie materialism
of the Old World politics which these wordy
American orators pretended to despise utterly.
*' Europe is . . . tottering on the verge of dis-
solution,'* ^*the Little Gianf exclaimed in
1845. ^'When you visit her, the objects which
enlist your highest admiration are the relics of
past greatness; the broken columns erected to
departed power. . . . They bring up the mem-
ories of the dead, but inspire no hope for the
living ! Here everything is fresh, blooming, ex-
panding and advancing. I would blot out the
lines on the map which now mark our national
boundaries on this continent, and make the area
of liberty as broad as the continent itself.''

Such spasms of oratory were of course char-
acteristic of those feverish years, which Pro-
fessor Dunning has wittily called *^the roaring
forties.'' They are only one degree worse or
better than the secret policy or the expressions
of flaming patriotism that could be discovered
in the records of Great Britain, and probably
really more human and respectable, than the
practises and principles of Continental Europe.
No one can look on the history of Europe or
America in the forties with much equanimity,
unless he remind himself that men were then

132 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

alive, who were to lead the nations on to better
things in the last half of the century.

Before 1860 it was plain that the Government
of the United States had assumed the position
of guardian in the Western Hemisphere; but
this guardianship, though partly based on popu-
lar suspicion of European politics and partly
also on pride in American institutions, was on
the whole, as expressed in the words of leading
politicians, not much less than a policy of ag-
grandizement. If this is too harsh a judgment,
it was a policy of hands off for Europe and a
free hand for the United States ; and the ethics
of the diplomacy consisted in the duty of prais-
ing democracy and in looking keenly, almost in-
tolerantly, at the struggling and distracted re-
publics of the southern continent. Meanwhile
there had arisen one of those startling con-
trasts, contradictions that vex and disturb the
regular and seemly flow of history. In 1823
Monroe and Adams had given utterance to the
sentiments of humanity in opposition to the
cruelty and arrogance of despotic power; be-
fore 1860 the United States stood out before
the world as the champion of slavery. Prating
loudly of liberty, we held 4,000,000 black peo-
ple in bondage. The foreign policy and the
ethical principles of Monroe and Adams were

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 133

darkened if not deadened under the pall of
slaveholding imperialism.

With the advent of Lincoln things looked bet-
ter; the new Republican party was a liberal
party and characteristically prepared to act
openheartedly, or at the worst decently, in its
dealings with weaker states. In the eyes of the
Republican party, the old Democratic party was
tainted by schemes of slavery extension. Sew-
ard, Lincoln's Secretary of State, was actu-
ated by feelings of neighborliness and respect,
and he openly announced the right of a state
**to establish and maintain its own government
without intervention, intrusion, or even in-
fluence, from foreign nations and especially
from the United States/' Anticipatory of
President Wilson's later position was Seward's
refusal to acknowledge, without delay, the au-
thority of a usurping despot who with well-
known agility and skill had pounced upon the
government of his native state. Seward wished
some kind of guaranty that the usurper's
power had real basis and rested on popular
desire.

Through the days of Seward (1861-1869) and
in the administrations of the next two decades,
there was, however, no recession from the prin-
ciple that the interests of the United States in

134 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

the Western Hemisphere were above and be-
yond those of any or all European powers. Not
only did we by a plain pronouncement of our
displeasure drive the French from Mexico in
1866 ; but at later times we quite unequivocally
opposed the establishment of European domin-
ion and even the extension of permeating in-
fluence or control. The nations of Europe were
given to understand that in the Americans the
interests of the United States were paramount.
No real leadership ^ among the American na-
tions was set up, a leadership based on a recog-
nition of community of interest and the wisdom
of good understanding; but there was opposi-
tion to interference by an external power, an
opposition as decided as Europe would have
felt if America had, unsummoned, stepped in to
settle the Schleswig-Holstein question or the
Alsace-Lorraine difficulty. Our government,
feeling more and more the actual necessity of
freedom for her own policies, intended to be free
from all perplexities arising from European
ambition. Even Britain's position in Central
America and the British attitude toward the

'Secretary Blaine did make attempts, not entirely without
success, to build up co-operation between the Latin-American
States and the United States; but it is probably safe to say
that the dominant idea at the time was our interest as dis-
tinct from that of Europe.

THE MONEOE DOCTRINE 135

canal problem were already vexing the soul of
the American diplomat.

With this rapid survey of developments in
the three decades after the Civil War, we must
content ourselves ; and we pass on to the Vene-
zuelan controversy of 1895, when President
Cleveland and Secretary Olney laid down with
great distinctness what they believed were our
rights and responsibilities and what the Monroe
Doctrine actually was. Venezuela and Britain
were engaged in a trying controversy over some
roods of territory, each claiming the disputed
land as her own. Britain refused to arbitrate,
and Venezuela, though impotent, was angry.
Suddenly the United States entered the lists,
demanding arbitration ; President Cleveland de-
clared to Congress that a commission of our
own should investigate the problem and reach
its own conclusions, and that our government
should maintain the findings of the commission.
Secretary Olney in his verbal controversy with
Lord Salisbury, was emphatic, not to say
brusque, while Lord Salisbury was precise, not
to say sharp in his retorts. The American
Secretary, not clouding his assertions by clever
circumlocution, openly proclaimed that *^ To-
day the United States is practically sovereign
on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the

136 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

subjects to which it confines its interposition.
Why? It is not because of the pure friendship
or good will felt for it. It is not simply by rea-
son of its high character as a civilized State,
not because wisdom and justice and equity are
the invariable characteristics of the dealings of
the United States. It is because, in addition to
all other grounds, its infinite resources combined
with its isolated position render it master of
the situation and practically invulnerable as
against any or all other powers. . . . The peo-
ple of the United States have learned in the
school of experience to what extent the relations
of the states to each other depend not upon
sentiment nor principle, but upon selfish inter-
est^'i

If anything could excuse such extraordinary
— I feel like saying offensive — language it was
the calm and maddening refusal of Britain to
arbitrate and the deliberate failure of British
ministers to recognize a state of mind and a
policy which the passing years had produced.
Probably both President Cleveland and his Sec-
retary were convinced that nothing but harsh
words and a very bold front would make any

^President Cleveland did give a basis for the doctrine
that savors of morality : * ' The Monroe Doctrine finds its recog-
nition in those principles of international law which are based
on the theory that every nation shall have its rights protected
and its just claims enforced.'*

THE MONEOE DOCTEINE 137

impression on the British cabinet of those days.
Lord Salisbury argued first, that the Venezue-
lan controversy conflicted not at all with the
original declarations of Monroe and thus re-
fused to recognize the development of Ameri-
can influence and popular sentiment; and he
then announced that Her Majesty's Government
must not be understood as accepting the Mon-
roe Doctrine. Although I am ashamed to con-
fess it, I am inclined to believe that, if Brit-
ain had not yielded, the majority of the Ameri-
can people would have gone willingly into war;
they would have gone into war for an idea and
because of resentment at what they believed
were the selfish, dictatorial and unreasonable
purposes of the British Government. Olney's
words must strike one to-day as most extraordi-
nary, as they did the writer of this paper twen-
ty-three years ago. His reference to Ameri-
ca's ^'infinite resource" and American mastery
of the situation were, in the light of British
seapower and our insignificant armed prepara-
tion, little less than ridiculous. Fortunately
there were men in England who looked with
horror on war between the two countries, and
fortunately America's independent examination
of the whole problem gave England an oppor-
tunity to recede without humiliation. Even

138 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

though the American Secretary may have in-
tended to attribute to Europe alone the sinister
principles of sordid selfishness, it is dishearten-
ing to think that only twenty-three years ago
such crude and bitter utterances issued from
the State Department with apparent sanction
of their general validity. On either side of the
water, diplomatic courtesy has rarely sunk
lower.

The Monroe Doctrine came out of the contro-
versy with new virility. It was, it seemed, no
mere principle for the defense of popular in-
stitutions nor a mere doctrine of primary inter-
est. The will of America in all European deal-
ings with the New World was a matter of imme-
diate concern; our fiat was law and our pur-
poses needed no justification but our word.
Senator Lodge defended the Monroe Doctrine
simply and solely as a fact; it needed no ex-
planation and no defense; it simply was. ^*We
declare the Monroe Doctrine,'' he said **to be a
principle which we believe essential to the
honor, the safety, the interests of the United
States. We declare it as a statement of fact,
and we must have it recognized as our inde-
pendence and national existence are recognized
by all the world.'' Though he offered some
slight modification, the doctrine appeared to be

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 139

that whatever was done or attempted by Eu-
rope on our side of the water must be done with
our approval or connivance. Possibly as far as
European interference in America is concerned,
Mr. Lodge's statement is the Monroe Doctrine
of to-dav ; but much water has flowed under the
bridge since 1895 ; new perplexities have arisen
and new responsibilities ; a liberal and just con-
ception of duties has come to the light, a con-
ception which embodies ethical considerations
and emphasizes justice and liberty and com-
panionship and service, ideals which are also
facts and they have been burned more deeply
into our very souls by the gigantic misery of
war. And yet, notwithstanding recent develop-
ments this must be said : the United States has
a lasting interest in the affairs of the Western
Hemisphere, and, if anything like the old prin-
ciple of selfish politics is to continue in the
world at large, the Monroe Doctrine will almost
necessarily be a defense against any kind of
foreign intrusion. With militarism triumphant,
it may be used as an excuse even for offense
by ourselves against Latin- American autonomy.
If the old regime in diplomacy and interna-
tional relation is to remain — notice we alreadv
call it the old regime — then the Monroe Doctrine
simply is a fact ; we forbid and shall try to pre-

140 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

vent any interference with the Western Hemi-
sphere, simply and only because we want no
trespass on our chosen preserves, no lodgment,
no influence within a field of operations which
is primarily American. Under the old regime
of suspicion and military menace, we are, I
believe fully justified in simply stating the Doc-
trine as a fact without palliation or praise or
verbal defense. It deserves no higher or better
place, if that is all there is to it, — no higher or
better place in the estimation of idealistic
statesmen than any European doctrine or policy
which would shut out foreigners from cherished
areas of economic penetration and political
overlordship. It may, I grant you, be even then
less purely selfish than the European policy of
like character ; but, as it is stated by Mr. Lodge,
it is fundamentally a policy, though based on
history and fostered by a quasi-idealistic senti-
mentality, which secures recognition on the
same ground as that on which spheres of in-
fluence and dictation are recognized in the old-
time and give-and-take (especially take) of
European diplomacy. Internally it will be, I
trust, altruistic; its selfishness may be softened;
but as a fact to be recognized by the other na-
tions of the world it will make no higher, deeper
or more human claims, than the assumptions of

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 141

the well-known policy of Europe. Only if the
world accepts the ethics of a clean Monroe Doc-
trine can we expect it to rest on anything but
force.

Before attempting to sketch the Monroe Doc-
trine of the present day, in so far as it deals
with relations between American States, I must
turn for a moment to the canal question, for
about the Panama canal in recent years the
problems of Monroeism have gathered. Right-
ly or wrongly, the United States has long had
objections to any but an Axaerican owned and
controlled canal. Useful to the world the canal
might be; but once built it would be to us a
necessity. Nearly forty years ago President
Hayes declared that it would be ^^ virtually a
part of the coast line of the United States.'* It
is unnecessary to recount the abrogation of the
old Clayton-Bulwer treaty of 1850, and the mak-
ing of the Hay-Pauncefote treaties of 1900 and
1901, which secured to America the independent
right to build and manage the canal. We may
also refrain from discussing our troubles with
Colombia and our acquisition of the canal strip ;
we got the canal strip and we built the canal.
I do not mean by this to justify or to condemn
the ethics of our procedure; it is simply too
complicated a problem for discussion here. We

142 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

banished malaria and yellow fever, and at an
expense of about $400,000,000 we finished the
canal. Let ns pass over, too, the question of
our right to fortify it; in the light of present
conditions we should be in a pretty fix down
there, if all we had to rely on were fides Teu-
tonica. We omit, too, the discussion over the
right to grant free passage to our coast-trade
vessels; under President Wilson we removed
the discrimination in favor of our own coast
trade.

I have been hurrying on to a consideration of
the later Monroe Doctrine. As the canal is
ours, though free to the world, and as we have
developing trade in the Gulf of Mexico and
the whole Caribbean, that region has for us a
peculiar interest. In a world of peace and good-
will we could go thoughtlessly and fearlessly
on ; in a world of suspicion, armament, intrigue
and heartless economic exploitation, we must be
on our guard. To put the case strongly, too
strongly, the Caribbean is within our sphere of
influence; to put it mildly we must have in its
waters or surrounding territory, no rival which
actually threatens our power and our routes of
communication. It is our Mediterranean, near
at hand; we must hold its Gibraltar and its
Malta; and it is our North Sea, — no Heligoland

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 143

in the Caribbean for ns; Colombia and Vene-
zuela are our Belgium, though a hundred times
more perplexing and a thousand times less self-
reliant. Such, I say, must be our attitude in
general if the principles of force are to govern
international relations.

Let us first notice the extension of our author-
ity and the acquisition of strategic positions in
this region during the last twenty years. In
1898 we secured the independence of Cuba; we
established practically a tenuous and unselfish
protectorate over the young republic and ac-
quired a coaling station at Guantanamo. At
the same time (1899) we accepted Porto Rico
from the tremulous hand of Spain. In 1903 we
obtained the canal strip and soon began our
work on the canal. By a recent treaty, we pur-
chased St. Thomas from Denmark. The Gibral-
tars and Maltas have been falling into our
hands. By establishing quasi-protectorates
over Santo Domingo and Haiti, of which I shall
say more in a moment, we gained reasonable
confidence that the important harbors in the
island of Haiti will not pass into foreign pos-
session, although our action was not primarily
actuated by military motives. There have been
infinite perplexities with Nicarauga; but these
have been partly settled by our obtaining by

144 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

treaty, within the last two years or so, Great
and Little Corn Islands in the Caribbean and
Fonseca Bay on the Pacific. I do not mean to
assert that all this extension of authority and
all these acquisitions of strategic positions are
due to deliberate policy to build up military and
naval security; certainly there has been little
or no evidence of imperialistic temper or de-
sire among the people at large; but the fact
remains, that in the last twenty years we have
greatly strengthened our hold in the whole
Gulf-Caribbean region.

If the task on hand were only to seize points
of strategic advantage, it would not present ex-
treme difficulty. But such is not the case; we
do not desire to pounce upon helpless states or
to enlarge our responsibilities. Aside from our
feeling that the Caribbean is our Mediterranean
because we must guard the canal and our routes
of trade, what is the nature or what are the
causes of the general problem? The nations of
Central America and the northern coast of
South America are weak, unstable and, in the
management of public finance, far from frugal
and economical. We often question their ability
to maintain their equilibrium; we often ques-
tion their ability to sustain thoroughly trust-
worthy governments capable of fulfilling their

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 145

obligations. No policy and no doctrine can
transmute ignorance and idleness into intelli-
gence, forethought and industry. Still we feel
and in some measure have assumed a certain
vague responsibility, at least a defensive re-
sponsibility, for these nations in their interna-
tional relationships.

Because, or partly because, of the conditions
just mentioned, we have found it necessary to
take particular interest in the public financial
conditions of these countries. Public debts due
to foreign capitalists are a source of concern.
European creditors do not quietly and patiently
put up with careless disregard of public obliga-
tions. European nations may be tempted to use
force to collect debts or may make the indebt-
edness a ground for actual political domina-
tion. On account of the apparently hopeless
condition of Santo Domingo, American authori-
ties in 1905, under the direction of President
Roosevelt and with the consent of the govern-
ment of Santo Domingo, took control of the cus-
toms revenue. This was brought about by a
characteristically bold stroke of our President,
who found that he did not need the consent of
the Senate for such an undertaking, because it
could be done by an *^ agreement'' and not by
a treaty. Two years later, in 1907, a treaty

146 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

was ratified by both governments. The condi-
tion in the Dominican republic and the need of
action on our part are matters of much interest,
for they show how conditions may in spite of
ourselves force us into a quasi, semi-real, half-
hearted imperialism. Santo Domingo was in a
condition approaching industrial ruin and ex-
isted as a sort of phantom republic fast falling
into decay. Irrespective of its public debt it
might be even a breeding place for disease af-
fecting the whole Caribbean region, the canal
district and perhaps our own southern ports. I
do not know how much the United States
was affected by prophylactic motives as dis-
tinguished from political and financial needs,
but if we remember how yellow fever aided
Toussaint POuverture to drive out the forces
of Napoleon something over one hundred years
ago, we may think that the mosquito helps to
make history; it is no respecter of doctrines.
But, however this may be, the patience of for-
eign ci editors was nearing an end; and, if we
were to protect the Dominicans from foreign
interposition, it was necessary to do something.
Fortunately the plan we adopted worked ad-
mirably ; Santo Domingo, in the hands of Ameri-
can financial agents, began to look up; revenue
was actually collected and honestly distributed.

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 147

and a recent writer/ to whose admirable treat-
ment I am indebted for some of the statements
in this paper, calls attention to the fact that an
ex-president of the Republic went out of office
without the help of a revolution and lived to
die without the help of an assassin.

In the meantime conditions in Haiti were al-
most as bad as they had been in Santo Domingo.
The American Navy restored order in the dis-
tracted so-called republic — ^more properly desig-
nated as a revolving despotism, — and finally in
the administration of President Wilson, Feb-
ruary, 1916, a treaty was made and ratified,
granting to our government supervision of the
finances of the country. Secretary Lansing an-
nounced that ^'the United States has no pur-
pose of aggression and it is entirely disinter-
ested in promoting this protectorate.'' We
have no reason to suppose that this action was
taken because of some secret imperialistic de-
sign.

I have already spoken of our arrangement
with Nicaragua, whereby we secured territory;
this arrangement was probably due, partly to
our desire for possession of certain strategic
positions, and partly due to internal financial

^Chester Lloyd Jones, in the Caribbean Interests of the
United States.

148 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

and political confusion of the country. No final
treaty has been entered into with Nicaragua
authorizing our supervision of her finances ; but
American capitalists have done something and
it is not unlikely that here, too, our government
must step in to take charge of the revenues.
Thus it is seen that we have been forced by the
Monroe Doctrine, i. e., by our permanent in-
terest in preventing foreign powers from ob-
taining new political authority in the Western
Hemisphere, and by our sense of obligation and
friendliness, to establish partial or real pro-
tectorates in the Caribbean region.

So far we have considered the perplexities
arising from governmental incompetence and
from the burden of the republic debts owned by
foreign capitalists. But there are other prob-
lems on the whole more vexing and disturbing.
If the Caribbean is our Mediterranean because
of our interest in the canal. Central America
and Mexico are our North African states. They
are undeveloped and backward regions like
those which have been economically penetrated
by the European powers; they are like those
backward nations which have been called the
stakes of modern diplomacy. There are many
causes for the present European war, but cer-
tainly one of them is the rivalry of the nations

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 149

for economic and political control in African
and Western Asia. The temptation to extend
capitalistic interest in Mexico and Central
America is very great. The region is exceed-
ingly rich and inviting; it cannot be left unde-
veloped; capital is needed and capital has al-
ready sought its legitimate opportunity. Be-
cause of the attractive fields for industrial en-
terprise, and because of our wary watchful-
ness, the Germans have sneered at the Monroe
Doctrine, declaring that it is purely an economic
pronouncement. This sneer at our pretended
possession of altruism or of any purely political
principles, this intimation that we are cherish-
ing Monroe for revenue only, is of course un-
founded, as perhaps I may show later ; but cer-
tainly the present and probably the future per-
plexities grow out of economic conditions. As
the shield of the Monroe Doctrine was first held
up a hundred years ago to protect struggling
independent nations from being crushed and
free government from being overthrown, so now
we fear economic exploitation and all its effects.
We realize that European capitalists, that have
made investments in Central America, may de-
mand protection and security from their o^ti
governments, and that the call may be answered

150 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

by political interference or possibly by political
domination.

I have said that the countries of the region
are rich in certain natural products and natu-
ral resources. From them come great quan-
tities of sugar, coffee, cocoa, rubber, lumber,
fruit and, perhaps most important of all, petro-
leum. It is said that 7,000,000 bananas are ex-
ported in a single year and we now annually
consume in the United States some 65 bananas
for every man, woman and child in the land.
Is it necessary to do more than refer to the oil
deposits of Mexico and the Caribbean region,
in order to call up a whole pandora box of cupid-
ities and perils? The oil regions of Mexico
are of vast extent and of great productivity.
Oil fields, as yet largely unexplored but doubt-
less of much importance, lie in Colombia. There
are, I believe, indications that the whole north-
ern coast of South America will be found to be
rich in oil. All this means a source of supply
for oil-burning naval ships and for merchant-
men, gasoline for automobiles and motor boats,
lubricants for countless shafts humming in in-
dustry. If the war has taught no moral lesson
and given us no political instruction, it has
surely shown the overwhelming importance of
four things — wheat, coal, iron, petroleum.

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 151

Thus, there arises the same sort of a condi-
tion as that which has troubled the political
system of Europe for a generation. From this
condition arise a series of questions. Does the
flag follow the dollar? How far shall we allow
ourselves to be imperialistic in politics by send-
ing the flag to protect capital invested in what
are called the backward nations? Can we al-
low foreign nations to obtain safety for in-
vested capital by using their fleets? Can we
allow our own government to use like methods ?
May we ourselves use any or all means, but
must we lay the heavy hand of Monroe on a
European government that would follow our ex-
ample? With the best of intentions and with
sincere desire to preserve peace, we are still
faced w^ith perplexities.

To make matters more puzzling still, we have
to do not alone with foreign investments but
with foreign companies and foreign individuals,
actually owning and managing vast properties ;
it is not simply a question of investment by for-
eigners in the domestic enterprises of a back-
ward state; the enterprises are British or Ger-
man or American and are managed by resident
foreigners. The industries of Guatemala, for
example, are largely in German hands. It is
declared that it is financially a German colony,

152 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

inasmuch as 80 per cent, of the capital is Ger-
man. Of the total wealth of Mexico about 40
per cent, is said to be owned by citizens of the
United States, about 13 per cent, by English-
men, 7 per cent, by Frenchmen, and the most of
the remainder by Mexicans.

In trying to reach some solution of these
problems, America has taken notable steps in
the last twenty years. Presented chronologi-
cally they appear as actual developments of an
established and clear-out policy. Although the
action taken in the case of Cuba, Santo Do-
mingo, Haiti and Nicaragua are important illus-
trations of this developing policy, I need not
refer to them again but will take up the an-
nouncements of principles. In a series of mes-
sages and discussions. President Roosevelt pre-
sented a number of very important assertions,
some of which, we may see, do not contradict
but help to support the principles and ethics
of doctrine of President Wilson, which I am
soon to discuss. 1. We must watch over the
approaches to the canal. 2. We shall interfere
with the Latin-American states only in case of
real need. 3. We shall not use the Monroe Doc-
trine to excuse aggrandizement on our part.
We must try to convince the nations of the
Western Continent that no just and orderly

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 153

government has anything to fear from us. 4.
We do not guarantee a state against merited
punishment, but punishment must not result in
taking of territory by any non- American power.
5. The Doctrine is a long step toward the peace
of the world. ^^ During the past century other
influences have established permanence and in-
dependence of the smaller states of Europe."
Through the Monroe Doctrine we hope to be
able to secure a like permanence here. 6. The
United States may be forced by the Monroe
Doctrine, in case of flagrant wrong doing or the
impotence of an American state, to exercise in-
ternational police power in America. 7. The
Monroe Doctrine is the cardinal feature of
American foreign policy and we must back it up
with a strong navy. 8. We do not intend to in-
terfere abroad, though not without sympathy
for unhappy peoples.^ Mr. Root, whose in-
fluence in the United States is very strong, has
on various occasions interpreted the Monroe
Doctrine in a spirit of liberality and respect for
the rights of smaller states of the Western
Hemisphere.

The United States delegates to the Pan-
A.merican Conference at Rio de Janeiro, in 1906,

^ I am indebted to Professor Hart 's Monroe Doctrine, for
condensed quotations from Mr. Roosevelt which I have used
as the basis of the above statements.

154 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

were instructed by Secretary Root that it had
been the long-established policy of the United
States not to use armed force for the collec-
tion of ordinary contract debts due to its citi-
zens by another government: **It seems to us
that the practise is injurious in its general ef-
fect upon the relations of nations and upon the
welfare of weak and disordered States, whose
development ought to be encouraged in the in-
terests of civilization; that it offers frequent
temptation to bullying and oppression and to
unnecessary and unjustifiable warfare." The
next year, this principle was advocated by the
American delegates at The Hague Conference
and it was at that time formally adopted. The
contracting nations thus agreed not to use
armed force for the recovery of debts claimed
from the government of one country by another ;
but the abstention from force was not to apply
in case of refusal to arbitrate or failure to sub-
mit to the award of arbitration. This doctrine
or principle, commonly called the Drago Doc-
trine, was first formulated by Louis M. Drago,
of Argentina :^ but it is not too much to say
that, though coming originally from the Argen-
tine, it found its place in the accepted public

*The doctrine originally advocated by Drago was some-
what more drastic or comprehensive than it was in the form
adopted at The Hague.

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 155

law of the world largely because of advocacy
by the United States ; it was a child or a protege
of the Monroe Doctrine.

By 1913, an enlarged, clarified and humanized
Monroe Doctrine had began to take very definite
shape, a doctrine which did not contradict the
old doctrine of Monroe, but was, as far as the
affairs of the Western Hemisphere were con-
cerned and as far inter-American relations
went, explicit in its statements, frank and not
ungenerous. Geographically the doctrine was,
perhaps, more limited in practical application
than it had been before; for unless conditions
have greatly changed, as they indeed may have
already changed because of the German danger
in Brazil, the Monroe Doctrine had come by
1913 to be chiefly concerned with the area north
of the equator, the area of the Gulf and the
Caribbean. The center of interest was the canal.
But the mere shifting of the center of gravity
toward the region of the canal was by no means
all. Based on the intrinsic morality of the old
Monroe Doctrine and attached to it, were now
certain positive statements not only of policy
but of international ethics. We have seen that
the old Doctrine did not pledge America to
refrain from any sort of activity in the new
world, though possibly its moral implications

156 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

involved consideration for the rights of other
nations; we have also seen that the Doctrine
fell in the course of time to be only a statement
of fact which must be accepted by other na-
tions ; it fell to be a statement of fact that the
American continents were our business and not
Europe's and that what we did here within our
sphere of influence (Olney said * ^ sovereignty ' ^
was nobody's concern but our own.

As I have said, before 1913 there was the
beginning of something else; preparing to de-
fend American States against acquisition of ter-
ritory by European powers, we went further, —
we stated our objection to the use of force to
collect debts, we helped in writing the modified
Drago Doctrine into the international law of
the world. We went still further; we were de-
veloping the reverse side of the Doctrine, bring-
ing out not so much the side of the shield that
faced Europe and warded her off, as the side
that faced the Yv^estern Hemisphere. The Doc-
trine became quite as much a principle of inter-
American relations as a warning to the rest of
the world ; it began to show a comprehension of
duty and responsibility; it was dimly seen to
embody a conception of ethical internationalism
to be applied in all inter-American relation-
ships; it was coming to be looked upon as a

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 157

guaranty of peace and good neighborhood with-
in half the world.

It remained for Mr. Wilson not only to sum
up in words the contents of the rejuvenated,
cleansed and developed Doctrine, but to live up
to it in conduct ; and more than this, it remained
for him to assert, not so much the negative and
prohibitory phase of the Doctrine as the newer,
positive and affirmative side, to declare that we
are interested in our neighbors' development;
not merely free from interest to injure them. In
an address before the Southern Commercial
Congress held at Mobile, Alabama, October 27,
1913, President Wilson said :

"What these states are going to see, therefore, is an
emancipation from the subordination which has been inevitable
to foreign enterprise and an assertion of the splendid character
which, in spite of these diflSculties, they have again and again
been able to demonstrate. The dignity, the courage, the self-
possession, the respect of the Latin-American States, their
achievements in the face of all these adverse circumstances,
deserve nothing but the admiration and applause of the world.
They have had harder bargains driven with them in the mat-
ter of loans than any other peoples in the world. Interest has
been exacted from them that was not exacted of anybody else,
because the risk was said to be greater, and then securities
were taken that destroyed the risks. An admirable arrange-
ment for those who were forcing the terms!

' ' Comprehension must be the soil in which shall grow all the
fruits of friendship, because there is a reason and a com-
pulsion lying behind all this which are dearer than anything
else to the thoughtful men of America; I mean the develop-
ment of constitutional liberty in the world. Human rights,
national integrity, and opportunity, as against material inter-
ests— that, ladies and gentlemen, is the issue which we now
have to face.

158 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

* * I want to take this occasion to say that the United States
will never again seek one additional foot of territory by con-
quest. She will devote herself to showing that she knows how
to make honorable and fruitful use of the territory she has.
And she must regard it as one of the duties of friendship to
see that from no quarter are material interests made superior
to human liberty and national opportunity. I say this, not with
a single thought that any one will gainsay it, but merely to
fix in our consciousness what our real relationship with the
rest of America is. It is the relationship of a family of man-
kind devoted to the development of true constitutional liberty.
We know that that is the soil out of which the best enterprise
springs. We know that this is a cause which we are making
in common with them because we have had to make it for our-
selves. . . .

* * This is not America because it is rich. This is not America
because it has set up for a great population great opportuni-
ties of material prosperity. America is a name which sounds
in the ears of man everywhere as a synonym of individual
liberty. I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free
than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with Liberty.
But we shall not be poor if we love liberty, because the nation
that loves liberty truly sets every man free to do his best
and be his best; and that means the release of all the splendid
energies of a great people who think for themselves. A nation
of employees cannot be free any more than a nation of em-
ployers can be. ..." *

We find here, therefore, not only a positive
reiteration of Roosevelt's statement against
aggrandizement, a declaration of restraint and
self-abnegation on our part — and let us notice
that this expression of our intention to refrain
from encroachment was of essential interest to
the Latin-American states — ^but also a statement
of decided and affirmative interest in the actual

* It was Montesquieu, I believe, who said that the wealth of
a nation depends not so much on the fertility of the soil as
on the freedom of the inhabitants.

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 159

welfare of Latin America. The Wilson policy
was and proved to be more than mere abnega-
tion; it rested on the political idea that a na-
tion has a right to shape its own destiny and
manage its own affairs, that its progress is of
benefit to civilization and not to itself alone,
that weaker nations must feel that they can
live in safety by the side of big ones, that it is
the duty of one nation to help another, not to
crush it, that capital must make way for the
ethics of decent politics and decent interna-
tionalism, that production may be aided by ex-
ternal capital, but that economic exploitation,
so easily degenerating into plunder, shall not be
sanctioned or supported by the political au-
thority of an external government, above all
not by our own, that economic burdens should
be eased rather than augmented, that the basis
of peace and peaceful industry is good faith and
morality and not the mailed fist or shining
armor, — all of which is not far remote from
George Washington's statement that honesty is
the best policy between nations as it is in pri-
vate life.

Some of you may say that President Wilson
in dealing with Mexico did not live up to this
code of ethics. He did, it is true, refuse to
recognize Huerta ; he did, if you insist, use in-

160 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

fluence not to say force against him. The rea-
son is plain — did it conflict with his theory? He
was convinced, I suppose, that if there ever was
to be order and sobriety in Mexico, the gov-
ernment ought not lightly to pass from one
carnivorous dictatorship to another. He did
not believe that the dagger was the proper war-
rant of election. He saw that Huerta^s dicta-
torship meant further conscienceless exploita-
tion by foreign capital or absorption of the rem-
nants of Mexican wealth. He was unwilling that
Huerta, by achieving success, should give aid
and comfort to other thirsty usurpers in the
Latin American countries. He believed that
there was hope of Mexico's struggling through
revolution into at least the paler sunlight of self-
government.

But if Wilson's refusal to acknowledge
Huerta was interference, his patient waiting
was the reverse. Under savage verbal assault
at home and under sharp and relentless criti-
cism, he refused to do more than watch and
wait. Our government refused to be driven
into war, sorely as we were pressed.^ He knew

* Though the President was accused of undermining Amer-
ican character by his readiness to deal patiently with the
Mexican trouble, instead of sending in an army and ''clearing
the whole thing up, ' ' there have been few occasions in history
disclosing more real bravery, as distinguished from pugilism,

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 161

that there might be no end to it ; he must have
seen that most of the acrimony in the United
States would be made use of by capitalistic in-
terests, and that if we made war on Mexico we
shattered the whole fabric of the new, humane,
peaceful, generous, hopeful Monroe Doctrine
and would heap up a new mountain of Latin-
American suspicions. He saw that a human
problem — a problem of ignorance and poverty —
cannot be swept away by war, unless you treat
a nation the way the Turks treated the Arme-
nians by simply carrying war to the ultimate
in extermination, or unless you treat them by
the methods we are told are now directed
against the Jugo Slavs that stand in the way of
triumphant Pan-Germanism. Possibly few per-
sons saw that President "Wilson, in handling
the Monroe Doctrine and in dealing with the
Mexican trouble, was expressing only those
principles which for fifteen months he has held
out to the world at war. Perhaps his refraining
so long from advising war against Germany was
due to a clear perception that the world had
not yet reached a stage of thought and feeling
in which the principles of the new Monroe Doc-
trine would find comfortable companionship.

than did his refusal to be stampeded and his holding our army
in leash, after it had actually entered Mexico to punish or drive
back the forces of Villa.

162 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

Whether this be the pose or not, we did go into
war at a time when the world, outside of the
military clique of Germany, was in a mood to
listen, at a time indeed when the nations had
reached, through experience, a place in which
they were ready to accept the doctrines of the
White House.

What then is the Monroe Doctrine in its newer
applications? What in its wider scope does it
involve and imply? We must turn to President
Wilson for clear statement. In his famous
speech of January 22, 1917, a speech in which
he doubtless sought to draw out European opin-
ion and find out just how far that opinion, espe-
cially among the Allies, would support Ameri-
can Liberal judgment, he used the phrase (I
think the ambiguous, perhaps unhappy, phrase
in an otherwise felicitous argument) — *^ peace
without victory.*' A careful reading of the
message indicates that he did not mean, in my
judgment, that no one must win; but that the
peace with all the usual accompaniments of con-
quest must not be forced on a conquered peo-
ple ; if the war brought victory to one side, the
other, in the peace, must not be treated with hu-
miliation and heart-breaking cruelty. The peace
must be between equals, not between a superior
victor and a vanquished inferior. All the world

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 163

save Mitteleuropa lias not come to that. ^^Only
a peace between equals,'' he goes on to say, *^can
last; only a peace the very principle of which
is equality and a common participation in a
common benefit. . . . The equality of nations
upon which peace must be founded if it is to
last, must be an equality of rights. Right must
be based upon the common strength, not upon
the individual strength of the nations upon
whose concert peace will depend. ... No peace
can last or ought to last which does not recog-
nize that governments derive all their just pow-
ers from the consent of the governed, and that
no right anywhere exists to hand people about
from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were
property. ... I am proposing, as it were, that
the nations should with one accord adopt the
doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine
of the world ; that no nation should seek to ex-
tend its policy over any other nation or people,
but that every people should be left free to de-
termine its own policy, its own way of develop-
ment, unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid, the
little along with the great and the powerful.
... I am proposing that nations henceforth
avoid entangling alliances which would draw
them into competitions of power, catch them in
a net of intrigue and selfish rivalry and disturb

164 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

their own affairs with influences intruded from
without. ... I am proposing government by
the consent of the governed ; that freedom of the
seas which in international conference after con-
ference representatives of the United States
have urged with the eloquence of those who are
the convinced disciples of liberty; and that
moderation of armaments which makes of
armies and navies a power for order merely, not
an instrument of aggression or of selfish vio-
lence. ' ' ^

President Wilson took up bodily and placed
in the new Monroe Doctrine, which he wished to
be the doctrine of the whole world, the sentences
which John Quincy Adams wrote and which
were not included in Monroe's message, prob-
ably because Monroe did not wish so full a state-

*Iii the spring of 1918, a year after we entered the war, the
President emphatically declared that inasmuch as Germany re-
lied on force and wished to try issues by force alone, force she
should have. I do not understand by this, however, that he has
given up the fundamental thesis of his ''peace without victory"
speech. It would be foolish in the extreme to go into a war or
expect another nation to go into war with the intention of not
winning a victory. He does presumably still believe that,
though war must have its victories, only a peace between
equals can last. The great purpose of the war is to defeat
Germany so thoroughly that haughty swaggering militarism
shall no longer clank its sword and flash its ''shining armor,''
and that the government of Germany will be suflSciently wise
and humble to see that right must be based upon the common
strength of the nations of the world. Even a dictated peace,
which I hope will come, will be a real and lasting peace only if
based on justice.

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 165

ment, or because Adams on reflection did not
think it was wise to lay down so advanced a
statement. Those sentences I have already
given, but they will bear repetition in this con-
nection: ^^1. That the institutions of govern-
ment, to be lawful, must be pacific, that is found-
ed upon the consent, and by the agreement of
those who are governed; and 2. that each Na-
tion is the exclusive judge of the Government
best suited to itself, and that no other nation
can justly interfere by force to impose a dif-
ferent Government upon it. The first of these
principles may be designated as the principle
of Liberty — the second as the principle of na-
tional Independence — They are both principles
of Peace, of Good Will to Men.'* We cannot be
sure that all the implications of these words
were explicitly in Adams' mind; but they are
strikingly like the principles which President
Wilson has announced. I have no reason for
thinking that the President borrowed his ideas
from Adams; he simply, in a notable crisis of
the world's history, gave utterance, as did
Adams, to the fundamental ethics of American
democracy.

It thus appears that government by consent
is the only lawful government ; moreover peace
and liberty appear to be mutually supporting.

166 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

Until, therefore, every nation of the world
adopts the principle of democracy in its inter-
nal organization, there can be little hope for
peace between nations. If this be true, it fol-
lows that all nations desiring peace have a real
interest in the internal organization of every
nation, and that internal autocracy menaces the
peace of the outside world. But if every na-
tion must have this interest and if autocracy
by its very existence imperils the world's peace,
we appear to have discovered a principle at
variance with the belief that each nation must
be the final judge of the government best suited
to itself. How far Mr. Adams or Mr. Wilson
reconciled these contradictions or unified the
two statements, I cannot say. It seems,
however, that Mr. Wilson believes in more
than the mere likelihood of covert attack by
militaristic autocracy upon the outside world.
He sees that democracy and autocracy are, by
their very natures, warring one against the
other ; that two inherently antithetical attitudes
toward life and its responsibilities are in con-
flict in time of peace ; that a method of internal
government which is based on the principle of
dictation from above and not on response from
below, which is based on the theory that the
few must rule and the rest obey and toil, is, by

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 167

the law and the logic of its misnamed soul,
prompted to disregard the rights of others
whose property it covets, and is prompted to
seize and to dictate, not to respect the privi-
leges and the free will of weaker neighbors. A
nation that is ruled internally by a select and
*^ superior'^ few, and this means a nation rest-
ing its government on the subjection of the
many, will belie its own principles, if in its re-
lations with other nations it cooperates on the
basis of equality and recognizes the self-de-
termination of peoples.

We may find, then, certain contradictions or
apparent contradictions in the words of these
two statesmen, although I ought to confess that
I may be carrying their sentiments forward to
conclusions which they would not be quite ready
to accept. In reality, we may in this war stop
short of a demand that Germany abandon the
practises and forms of autocratic government;
but this war has shown what perhaps John
Quincy Adams saw a century ago, that only a
government resting on consent can by its own
philosophy be a lover of real peace; and, if
the world is to have real and abiding peace, it
must be freed from the menace of a govern-
ment resting on force and on the legal theory
that one or a few have the right to control the

168 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

rest. If this war does not banish autocracy
from Germany, one of two possible conditions
will exist after the war. 1. Other nations will
become in essence autocratic and carry the un-
ethical notions of forceful government; 2. The
world will be divided into two camps with hos-
tile philosophies of life, each endangering the
existence of the other ; for democracy and autoc-
racy continually cry out against the fundamen-
tal and elemental principles of the other. If
Germany is sufficiently beaten to recognize the
ethics of liberty, the world will become essen-
tially harmonious, as far as the basic philosophy
of national life can make it so. There is, of
course, one other possible condition, and that
is that Germany, though still retaining autoc-
racy and her malodorous philosophy, be reduced
to a state of impotence ; such was the meaning
of Mr. Balfour's declaration that Germany must
be powerless or free.

John Quincy Adams, whom scholars now rec-
ognize as the author of the Monroe Doctrine,
if any one man is entitled to that distinction,
and Woodrow Wilson, who has proposed the
Monroe Doctrine of the world, believe in democ-
racy of international relations. Both have faith
in justice and friendly interest and reciprocal
respect as the basis of peace and of developing

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 169

civilization. Both repudiate brate force as the
proper means of deciding questions of right.
Both consider national independence and free-
dom the basis of peace and good will.

There is an appearance of paradox, not to
say contradiction, in Mr. Wilson's standing be-
fore the world as the champion of nationalism
and of national self-determination, when he is
also leading the world to a position of ac-
tual internationalism — the internationalism of
friendly cooperation. He is, seemingly, preach-
ing the doctrine of self-contained and self-de-
termining nationality, when we in America have
faith in the disappearance of partitions be-
tween nationalities, in the sinking of racial bar-
riers and in the amalgamation of men of many
tongues. But faith helps us to dissolve this
paradox; for if a nationality is unpersecuted,
**left free to determine its own policy, its own
way of development, unhindered, unthreatened,
unafraid," it is sure to lose its sense of isola-
tion ; it is sure under the influence of commerce,
of thought, in a word of modem civilization,
to find its contacts and to feel itself a portion
and only a portion of the great world. The
old fable in the school reader about the wind
and the sun, who had entered into a wager as to
which could the more quickly make the traveler

170 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

lay aside his cloak, is of perennial appositeness.
Let the small nation bask in the sun of safety,
nnthreatened and unafraid, and it will soon
lay aside its cloak and partake willingly in the
labors of a complicated and closely interwoven
civilization.

Whatever else we may say — and here I re-
turn definitely to the Monroe Doctrine — Amer-
ica is now able to enter the court of the world
with clean hands. Thanks to the Mobile speech
and the rectitude of twenty years behind it, and
thanks to our policies with poor distracted
Mexico, we can stand unabashed as we ask the
nations of the world to throw aside the whole
baneful system of greed, lust and exploitation.
To ask Europe to adopt the Monroe Doctrine
of the world is not the plea of a wolf in sheep's
clothing.

To apply the new Monroe Doctrine, based on
the principle that liberty and peace go hand
in hand, and that autocracy, war and slavery
are intimates in the field and in the coun-
cil chamber — to apply the new doctrine in the
world is sure to be difficult in practise, though
simple in theory. We should despair, indeed,
were it not that the free press of Europe ap-
plauds and it seems, understands the signifi-
cance of it all. We should despair unless we

THE MONEOE DOCTRINE 171

also saw more or less acquiescence in the belief
that a lasting peace must be a peace of peoples,
not a scheme of governments. We should have
slight ground for hope unless we knew that
fresh liberal forces are awake and active in
the souls and minds of tens of millions of Euro-
pean common people.

Let us remember, then, that the Monroe Doc-
trine of to-day is primarily not the Americas
for the Americans, although it probably does
still include objection to the extension of Euro-
pean authority in the Western Hemisphere. It
means a principle of decent and humane rela-
tionship between nations. It means not beat-
ing down the weak, not even sucking out the life
blood of the helpless by commercial profiteering.
It means the opposite of Prussian Politik,

There is basis for hope that, in the forthcom-
ing arrangement of Europe, peace will recog-
nize national liberty, because people believe that
liberty will maintain peace. It is a strange fact
that we in America fear or have feared that
the Monroe Doctrine might be lost as a result
of our entering the war. Naturally its safety
depends on our winning the war and above all
on our winning the principles for which we
fight. If war ends in need of new armaments,
in the perpetuation of stealthy diplomacy, then,

172 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

even if Germany is militarily defeated, we must
hasten to put on the buckler ; we may be physi-
cally victorious, morally vanquished; we must
hasten to protect the Western Hemisphere as
our bailiwick and within it strive to live up to
our principles, if we can, in the face of a world
whose ethics will be oozy with suspicion and
envy and commercialism. But we fight to end
all this, to supplant suspicion by good faith,
to put trustworthy documents in the place of
scraps of papers, to assure the right of small
nations to live. And if we succeed, the Monroe
Doctrine need no longer be defensive and pro-
vincial; it need no longer be merely a watch-
word of our power or evidence of our distrust.
More than ever before it will be, if we succeed,
necessary to wipe from it all contamination of
selfish greed and ambition for conquest ; for the
world will have accepted it; the Monroe Doc-
trine will have been extended across the ocean
and finally have worsted, on the battle ground
of autocracy, the political system against which
Monroe pronounced his principles one hundred
years ago. And notice, too, that if the Monroe
Doctrine originally meant that the United
States must be free from the entangled skein
of European PolitiJc; it proposes now that we
win assured freedom by going across the water

THE MONROE DOCTRINE 173

to help in destroying the whole system of force,
suspicion and intrigue to which Germany still
clings, and to set up in its place an appeal to
the tribunal of public intelligence.

THE BACKGROUND OF AMERICAN

FEDERALISM

THE BACKGEOUND OF AMERICAN

FEDERALISM

The purpose of this paper is to make plain
two facts : first, that the essential qualities of
American federal organization were largely the
product of the practises of the old British em-
pire as it existed before 1764; second, that the
discussions of the generation from the French
and Indian War to the adoption of the federal
Constitution, and, more particularly, the dis-
cussions in the ten or twelve years before inde-
pendence, were over the problem of imperial
organization. The center of this problem was
the difficulty of recognizing federalism; and,
though there was great difficulty in grasping
the principle, the idea of federalism went over
from the old empire, through discussion, into
the Constitution of the United States. By fed-
eralism is meant, of course, that system of poli-
tical order in which powers of government are
separated and distinguished and in which these
powers are distributed among governments,

177

178 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

each government having its quota of authority
and each its distinct sphere of activity.^

We all remember very well that, until about
thirty years ago, it was common to think of the
United States Constitution as if it were
^^ stricken off in a given time by the brain and
purpose of man.'^ About that time there be-
gan a careful study of the background of con-
stitutional provisions and especially of the spe-
cific make-up of the institutions provided for
by the instrument.^ It is probably fair to say
that the net result of this investigation was the
discovery that the Constitution was in marked
degree founded on the state constitutions, and
that they in turn were largely a formulation of
colonial institutions and practises; the strong
influence of English political principles and
procedure was apparent, though commonly that
influence had percolated through colonial gov-
ernments and experiences.

In such studies as these just mentioned, we
do not find, nor have recent works furnished us,
any historical explanation of the central prin-

* This paper is limited to the subject stated above. It does
not pretend to assert or deny economic influences. It confines
itself to the intellectual problem of imperial Order. Only one
other subject vies with this in importance — the problem of
making real the rights of the individual under government.

^ The first of these studies, as far as I know, was Alexander
Johnston's *' First Century of the Constitution" in the New
Princeton Beview, IV (1887), 175.

AMERICAN FEDERALISM 179

ciple of American federalism.^ And still, one
may well hesitate to give the historical explana-
tion, because, when stated, it appears as obvious
as it is significant. No better occasion than this,
however, is likely to arise for acknowledging
the fact that out of the practises of the old em-
pire, an empirical empire, an opportunistic em-
pire, an empire which to-day is seeking for-
mulation in law or in public acknowledgment
of institutional coordination, an empire which
the Englishmen even of a century and a half
ago did not understand — no better time than
now to acknowledge that to the practises of
English imperialism we owe the very essence
of American federalism. It is a striking fact
that there are two great empires in the world :
one the British empire based on opportunism
and on the principles of Edmund Burke; the
other the American empire based on law, the
law of imperial organization. The first of these,
an empire without imperial law, was profound-
ly influenced by the experiences of the Ameri-
can Revolution and by slowly developing lib-
eralism; the other — an empire with a funda-
mental law of coordination, also influenced by
its experiences and by Revoluntionary discus-

* For one of the books which does in some degree recognize
the nature of the Revolutionary discussion, see Imperium et
Libertas.

180 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

sion — institutionalized and legalized, with some
modifications and additions, the practises of
the prerevolutionary imperial system of Brit-
ain.^

If we go back to the old empire as it was,
let us say in 1760, we find that it was a compos-
ite empire, not simple and centralized. We
are not speaking of any theory of the law of
the empire but of its actual institutions and
their practical operation.

First: The active instrument or authority
of imperial government was the crown. It
operated, of course, most immediately and ef-
fectively in the royal colonies. It operated by
the appointment of some officials, by instruc-
tions, and by disallowance of colonial acts.
The generalization is probably just, that in-
struction and disallowance were exercised
chiefly for essentially nonlocal, imperial pur-
poses, the maintenance, of the character and
aim of the empire. The process of review of
cases appealed from the colonies can probably
be similarly classified — its operation was for
homogeneity in part but substantially for im-

* So successful has been the empire of opportunism, of
operation and cooperation based on understandings, not on fixed
law, that we find ourselves looking with some misgiving on dis-
cussions now in progress at Westminster, lest, through well
intentioned effort to reach definiteness, fluidity be changed to
rigidity.

AMERICAN FEDERALISM 181

perial purposes. This central authority of the
empire had charge of foreign affairs, navy and
army, war and peace, subordinate military au-
thority being left to the individual colonies.^
It managed the post office; it was beginning to
take charge of Indian affairs and trade with
the Indian tribes; it had charge of the back
lands and of crown lands within the limit of the
colonies; it was preparing to take in hand the
building up of new colonies (our territorial sys-
tem) ; it exercised executive power in carrying
out the legislation of Parliament which was
chiefly concerned with trade and navigation.

Second: Parliament had legislated little if at
all for strictly local internal affairs of the col-
onies. If we omit for the moment acts of trade
and navigation, we should find the act making
colonial real estate chargeable with debts, the
post office, the Naturalization Act of 1740, the
Bubble Act, the act against the land bank, the
act against paper money. Each one of these
acts was of imperial scope or nature, because
it was directed against an evil of more than lo-
cal extent, or because, as in the case of the post

* Working out the principle of federalism in military affairs
was a big problem in the French and Indian War, in the decade
before independence, in the Kevolution, in the Federal Con-
vention, in the War of 1812, in the Civil War, in the Congress
of 1916, in the War of 1917.

182 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

office, it was of more than local interest. The
acts of trade and navigation were in some in-
stances, for example, the act against the smelt-
ing of iron, a somewhat rnde intrusion upon the
sphere of local action; but to see these things
properly we must associate them together with
the general policy of mercantilism, and see them
as a part of a system, not always wisely de-
veloped, of making a self-sustaining empire. On
the whole. Parliament, as was perfectly natural,
had to a very marked extent interested itself in
regulation of trade; it was perfectly natural
that the empire as far as Parliament was con-
cerned should have been largely a commercial
empire; the part played by mercantilistic doc-
trine in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies made such parliamentary interests and
activities inevitable.^

Third: The Colonies managed their own 'in-
ternal police,'^ some of them under charters, all
by governments in which there were representa-
tive assemblies. They levied taxes for local

* I have left out of consideration the question of the ab-
sorption by the colonies of common law and the acceptance of
legislation modifying common law, especially criminal law. It
is a big and complicated question. Limited space does not
permit the treatment. I content myself with a general picture
of the make-up of the empire, which I believe is substantially
correct. It is also noteworthy that there was in the empire
national or imperial and local citizenship, and that naturaliza-
tion by colonial authorities was after 1740 under imperial law.

AMERICAN FEDERALISM 183

purposes, and voluntarily contributed, after a
wholesome or a ramshackle manner, to the de-
fense of the empire. They managed local trade,
and, in short, did the thousand and one things
— sometimes under pressure from the repre-
sentatives of the royal prerogative — that con-
cerned the daily life of the colonist.

Any one even slightly familiar with Ameri-
can constitutional system will see at once that
to a very marked degree we have here the dis-
tribution of powers characteristic of American
federalism. In fact, if we add to the powers
of the central authority in the old empire the
single power to obtain money by direct or in-
direct taxation immediately from the colonists
for imperial purposes, we have almost exactly
the scheme of distribution of our own consti-
tutional system.^ Of course there had to be
found a thorough working legal basis and
a legal method of operation. The legal basis
was found when the constitutional convention

*The reader may object that Congress can now provide for
standards of weights and measures, patents, and copyrights.
He might point out, possibly with justice, that coining money
and regulating the value thereof did not belong in the old
empire to the central authority; but I leave the old practise
to justify my assertion and refer again in passing to the act
against paper money. The bankruptcy power, as a part of
the general power of our central government, probably can
be traced back with certainty at least to colonial conditions,
and the Bubble Act and its extension to the colonies must not
be forgotten.

184 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

of 1787 declared that the Constitution should
^ be law. The operation of the central govern-
ment directly upon its own citizens, a most im-
portant quality of our own federalism, prob-
ably came in part from the old empire, but was
distinctly worked out in the debates of the con-
vention.

If any one wishes to criticise unfavorably
some detail of the scheme of empire which has
just been sketched, he will still scarcely deny
that Britain had a working federal empire by
the middle of the eighteenth century. If Great
Britain, in 1760, had reached out and said, * ^ this
is the law of the empire; thus the system is
formed,'^ she would have seen herself as the
most considerable member of a federal state
based distinctly on law and not on practise
alone. If Britain by a formal constitution could
have formulated the empire, she had, if the im-
perial order could have been frozen, petrified,
in the form that time had made for it, the Brit-
ish empire would have been legally a federal em-
pire. But though she did not, she made her
contribution ; her imperial history had selected
and set apart the particular and the general,
according to a scheme which was of lasting sig-
nificance in the development of American im-
perial order. On that general scheme of dis-

AMERICAN FEDERALISM 185

tribution the Constitution of tlie United States
was founded.

Let us now discuss this subject more in detail
and with some consideration for chronological
sequence, with some deference, that is to say,
to the order and time in which events occurred
and arguments were put forth. The scheme of
imperial order presented by the Albany con-
gress is so well known that it does not need ex-
tended comment; it is of interest as a plan for
redistribution of powers in certain essential
particulars and it is of lasting significance as
an effort to select certain things of extra-colony
rather than intra-colony importance, those
things which needed general control by a colo-
nial representative body. It tried chiefly to
solve the problem of imperial order as far as
that centered in the need of securing men and
money for imperial security; and for the time
the plan failed.

This matter of imperial security, augmented
in weight by the experiences of the war, be-
came the center of dispute in the decade or so
after the peace of 1763. Could England by
parliamentary enactment secure money for im-
perial defense? While this question was the
center of dispute, the discussion was soon nar-

186 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

rowed, or, if you like, broadened, to this: Did
the colonies as constituent parts of the whole
possess certain indefeasible legal rights and es-
pecially the right to hold on to their own purse-
strings I The dispute was narrowed because it
came to be confined to the field of theory; it
was not a question as to whether Parliament
could get money from the colonies but whether
they would acknowledge the abstract legal right
to get it. The dispute was broadened, because
it involved the whole question of interdepend-
ence and relationship.

Any amount of argument over the theoretical
legal right to exercise sovereignty in the em-
pire does not get one very far. There is no
great practical value in trying to determine
whether the colonies by the principles of Eng-
lish law were subject to taxation by Parliament.
It may not be amiss, however, to point out that
most of this argument, as far as it seeks to
make out that Parliament did have the taxing
power, whether that argument was made in
1765 or in 1917, has for its basis the constitu-
tion of the island and not that of the empire. It
is largely insular argument, based on insular
experience and founded on insular history. The
unwritten constitution of the empire is the other
way, and that is just what the men, especially

AMERICAN FEDERALISM 187

the Englishmen, of a hundred and fifty years
ago could not see. They could not think and
talk imperially, when it came to a matter of con-
stitutional law. If the practical working empire
of 1760 had been frozen into recognizable legal
shape, the right to tax the colonies would not
have been within the legal competence of Par-
liament, even as an imperial legislature. And
because the Englishmen did not think imperi-
ally, because they did not realize that time had
wrought out for them a composite federal em-
pire, because they insisted on the principle of
centralization in theory, they failed patiently to
set about the task of determining some way by
which, while recognizing federalism and colo-
nial integrity, they could on a basis of justice
and consent obtain authoritatively an acknowl-
edged legal right to tax for strictly imperial
purposes. Men that could not comprehend fed-
eralism, who denied the possibility of its ex-
istence, were incapable of dealing with a crisis
of an imperial system in which federalism al-
ready existed.^

*This statement needs modification, for Burke, rejecting
legalism, still displayed statesmanship of the highest order.
He resented any attempt to fossilize or ossify the empire and
sought to hold out the idea of parliamentary duty rather than
legal power. In these latter days it would be stupid to declare
that one must grasp and apply legal federalism if he is to
deal with the elements of a composite empire ; Burke 's prin-

188 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

Some one may say, and with considerable
justice, that the colonists were also incapable,
quite as incapable as the parliamentarian and
the British pamphleteer, of understanding the
nature of a composite empire. It long remained
true as Franklin said in disgust after the fail-
ure of the Albany plan: ** Everybody cries, a
Union is absolutely necessary, but when they
come to the Manner and Form of the Union,
their weak noddles are perfectly distracted.''^
That was the trouble — weak noddles. But,
withal, the idea was hard to grasp, simple as it
may appear to us; and it took the discussions
and experience of a generation to find the man-
ner and form of imperial order, though, when
they did find it, it was the old scheme only in
part modified, representing in its method of dis-
tributing powers the familiar practises of the
empire.^

ciples of duty and of freedom have been proved to be the
cement of the British empire. But, withal, it is quite plain that
the statesmen of the Kevolution on both sides thought there
was need of fixing legal authority; and those incapable of
seeing the principle of distributed authority — federalism — were
in a bad way.

* Writings, ed. by A. H. Smyth, III, p. 242.

^ It is worth noticing that at a later time Franklin himself
after reading a considerable portion of Dickinson's Farmer's
Letters is evidently at a loss; and he at a comparatively early
day, about 1768, found no middle ground between complete in-
dependence of the colonies and complete power of Parliament.
Speaking of the Farmer's Letters Franklin wrote: *'I have
read them as far as No. 8 ... I am not yet master of the

AMERICAN FEDERALISM 189

And yet it is not quite correct to say that
colonial noddles utterly failed. It is true that
the colonists often spoke as Englishmen, they
claimed rights as Englishmen, they, too, argued
on the basis of insular law; and indeed the prin-
ciples of insular law were not at variance with
the rights which they set up as citizens in the
empire. But some of them went further, and
defended the rights of the colonies, as distin-
guished from the rights of Englishmen; they
defended, to use later phraseology, states rights
as distinguished from individual rights; they
argued from the structure of the empire rather
than from the principles which aim to protect
the individual from governmental wrong. As
far as they did this, they grasped the nature of
an imperial system in which the outlying por-
tions had their own indefeasible share, legal
share, of political authority.

If there were space to examine critically the
whole mass of constitutional arguments, we

idea they and the New England writers have of the
relation between Britain and her colonies. I know not what
the Boston people mean by the ' subordination ' they acknowl-
edge in their Assembly to Parliament, while they deny its
powers to make laws for them, nor what bound the Farmer
sets to the power he acknowledges in Parliament to * regulate
the trade of the colonies', it being difficult to draw lines be-
tween duties for regulation and those for revenue; and if the
Parliament is to be the judge, it seems to me tliat establishing
such principles of distinction will amount to little. ' ' Quoted in
note in Memoirs of the Historical Society of Penn., XIV, 281.

190 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

should see a groping after the idea of classifi-
cation of powers, and on the other hand the
emphatic declaration, that to deny to a govern-
ment the right to make any particular law or
any special kind of laws is to deny all power
and authority — government must have full sov-
ereign power or none. In examining some of
the materials throwing light on the nature of
the arguments, it will be well on the whole to
exclude those assertions from which we can
gather only inferentially that the w^riter or
speaker grasped the principle of differentia-
tion. As we have already seen, the Albany plan
was distinctly based on the idea of classification
and distribution. The controversv of 1764 re-
garding the revenue act brought out occasional
indications that certain distinctions were close
at hand, if not as yet fully comprehended; at
least there was a recognition of the old exercise
of power over trade and an objection to the
newly proposed schemes of revenue. In the
main, however, the American opposition at that
time was not clearly and precisely directed
against taxation because it violated a principle
of imperial structure, but rather because it vio-
lated a principle of English personal liberty.
Otis, in his Bights of the Colonies Asserted, de-
nies the authority of Parliament to tax, and ad-

AMERICAN FEDERALISM 191

mils their right to regulate trade ; but his argu-
ment against taxation is English, not imperial
argument, on the whole. It is probably safe to
say he relied on personal right rather than on
the principles of empire.^

Still in these early days of 1764 and 1765 cer-
tain fundamentals did appear, even when lines
were not drawn with the precision of later days.
Dulaney recognized a supreme authority in Par-
liament to preserve the dependence of the colo-
nies ; he spoke of the subordination of the colo-
nies, which still, however, retained rights de-
spite their inferiority; for ^*in what the Supe-
rior may rightly controul, or compel, and in
what the Superior ought to be at Liberty to act
without Controul or Compulsion, depends upon
the nature of the dependence, and the Degree
of the Subordination.''^ He suggests that a
line may be drawn *^ between such Acts as are
necessary, or proper, for preserving or secur-
ing the Dependence of the Colonies, and such

* This interpretation of Otis is of course strengthened by
the fact of his belief in the representation of the colonists in
Parliament and his reliance on the right of a court to declare
an unjust act void; but, after all, Otis did distinguish be-
tween powers, and did believe in the constitutional restraints
on Parliament.

* Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the
British Colonies for the purpose of raising a revenue, by act of
Parliament. (London, 1766), p. 16, Tyler says that there was
an American edition of 1765. This I have not seen.

\y

192 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

as are not necessary or proper for that very
important Purpose. ' ' ^ He thus clearly points
to the possibility of an empire managed in the
large by a central authority, but in which the
outlying parts are possessed of indefeasible au-
thority on subjects belonging of right to them,
subjects which do not contravene the general
superintending power lodged in the central au-
\._ thority. He naturally dwells on those particu-
lar exercises of authority then under dispute,
and declares that there is **a clear and neces-
sary Distinction between an Act imposing a Tax
for the single Purpose of Revenue, and those
Acts which have been made for the Regulation
of Trade, and have produced some Revenue in
Consequence of their Effect and Operation as
regulations of Trade. ' ' ^ This pamphlet of Du-
laney's was a statesmanlike production, and
contained at least the foundations for the con-
ception of federalism.^

Unhappily, in 1766 Franklin in his examina-
tion before the committee of commons does not
indulge in clear and precise thinking. Had he

^ Ibid., p. 17. See for an early statement of federalism, Ann
Maury, Memoirs of Huguenot Family, 425-426 ; letter of Maury
to Fontaine, December 31, 1765. Portions of Patrick Henry's
resolutions of 1765 have the federal ar^ment.

^ Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the
British Colonies, etc. (London, 1766), p, 46.

'See also Stephen Hopkins, Grievances of the American
Colonies Candidly Examined, p. 19.

AMERICAN FEDERALISM 193

then enlarged on the character of the imperial
stmcture, and had he sharply drawn the lines
of demarcation between imperial superintend-
ence and colonial legal right, possibly the listen-
ing commons might have understood the vital
distinctions. Franklin's examination admirably
discloses the opportunistic and nonlegalistic na-
ture of his statesmanship. In this examination
he does, of course, emphasize the colonial ob-
jection to revenue acts; but he became hope-
lessly confused in discussing the basis for trade
regulation, and impressed on his listeners that
what was objectionable was internal taxation as
distinguished from external ; he appears to have
impressed this distinction so firmly that the
Englishmen never lost the notion that it was
peculiarly dear to the American heart; and,
when within a year or two external taxes were
levied, the English administrators were hurt in
their minds by the prompt rejection of their
schemes. It is true that Lyttleton (1766) called
the attention of the lords to the fact that the
Americans made no such distinction, and that
it could not be found in Otis's pamphlet;^ but
the idea seems to have persisted, aided prob-

*"Mr. Otis, their champion, scouts such a distinction."
Pari Hist., XVI, col. 167.

194 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

ably by the loose use of terms by occasional
American writers.

It was partly to clear up sucli confusion as
this, and to draw the line properly, that John
Dickinson penned his Farmer ^s Letters. The
thinking of Dickinson was plain, straightfor-
ward and able. Possibly in his first letter he
enters upon indefensible ground ; for, having in
mind the effort to compel the New York legisla-
ture to furnish quarters for troops and thereby
to incur certain expense, he insists that an order
to do a thing is the imposition of a tax. But
in no other place does he become entangled in
dubious assertions.^ Dickinson spoke as an im-
perialist, as one who saw and felt the empire;
he is hardly less emphatic in his declarations
concerning the imperial power of Parliament
and the existence of a real whole of which the
colonies are parts, than in defending the inde-
feasible share of empire which the colonies pos-
sessed. Hitherto, the colonies, save as they had
been restrained in trade and manufacture by
parliamentary legislation under the general
principles of mercantilism, had been regulated
even for purposes of empire largely by the ex-
ercise of the royal prerogative. Dickinson real-

^ For a sharp statement of Dickinson's position of empire
consistent with colonial freedom — freedom of the colonies — see
the early parts of Letter II of the Fanner's Letters.

AMERICAN FEDERALISM 195

ized the necessity of parliamentary control and
guidance ; lie saw as did Dulaney the need of a
superintending authority, and he openly ac-
knowledged that it lay with Parliament. It was
perfectly inevitable that a statesman — colonial
or English — should think of the control of trade
as the big duty, and thus Dickinson emphasized
that duty and the right of Parliament to direct
the trade of the whole system. He saw an em-
pire, composite and not simple or centralized,
with a Parliament possessed of indubitable
power to maintain the whole and chiefly to look
after the interests of the whole by the regula-
tion of trade.^

It was just because Dickinson was thinking
imperially and was doing more than to acknowl-
edge that Parliament might regulate trade, that
his words deserve especial weight. He was not
speaking as a disgruntled colonist merely find-
ing fault ; he was not setting up purely insular
constitutional principles ; he was not talking as
a frontier individualist ; he saw the existence of
an imperial reality and he presented strongly

* The distinction between regnlation of commerce and taxa-
tion never, I think, entirely disappeared from the colonial
mind, though after about 1772 some leaders came to the point
of openly asserting complete freedom from parliamentary con-
trol. See for the distinction Letter from the MassacMisetts
House to Dennis de Berdt (London, 1770), p. 16. It is pos-
sible that this letter was written earlier than 1770. I have
been unable to find it in the Mass. State Papers.

196 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

certain principles of imperial structure. He
denied that Parliament had the right to tax;
scouting the supposed distinction between in-
ternal and external taxation, he openly admitted
the authority of Parliament to regulate trade.

Taxation is an imposition for the raising of
revenue; it at times seems strange, not that
Dickinson should have made the distinction be-
tween taxation and regulation, but that men at
all experienced with actual practises of the em-
pire and familiar with mercantilistic doctrine
should not have readily accepted it. That dis-
tinction had been touched on before Dickinson
wrote; but he made the thing so evident that
men ought to have been able to see it. Still it
is not plain that men did see it. At least they
were not quite able to see that he was propos-
ing not only a perfectly valid distinction be-
tween powers, but a real theory of imperial
structure. Consequently Dickinson *s words did
not have the weight they deserved in pointing
the way to composite empire, an empire in which
there was an indefeasible participation of the
parts under a government charged with the
maintenance of the whole. Federalism, we must
remember, necessitates singling out of specific
branches of authority, which we commonly call
** powers." Nothing is simpler in the primer

AMERICAN FEDERALISM 197

of our constitutional law than the distinction
between the taxing power and the power to reg-
ulate interstate and foreign commerce. Any
person, though he be unlearned in jurispru-
dence, will talk glibly of the commerce power,
the treaty making power, the taxing power and
many other powers, fully realizing that we take
certain authorities of government and label
them, put them in certain receptacles, and leave
to our astute courts the duty of deciding
whether a legislative act is to be classified thus
or so and whether it is a due exercise of ^^ pow-
ers" that have been authoritatively granted.
And so it is amazing to us, this difficulty in see-
ing the validity of this most commonplace dis-
tinction, and that writers should still think Dick-
inson was speaking in confusion instead, as was
the fact, talking the A B C of American con-
stitutional law.

Dickinson's position distinguished the power
cO regulate trade from the power tb tax. The
distinction deserves to be called proper, because
we have had it in active operation under our
Constitution for a century and over. But it was
proper, also, because it carried on the practises
of the old empire. Parliament had regulated
trade ; it had not taxed. For a century or more
the empire had acknowledged in practise, as

198 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

well as in charters and commissions and in-
structions, the existence of colonies with the au-
thority to tax for local concerns, and had re-
frained from taxation for imperial purposes.
To a marked degree we may say again the em-
pire was a commercial empire. Its commercial
purposes were expressed in navigation acts, and
a large portion even of the administrative con-
trol by the Royal council had been directed to
the support of those enactments and that com-
mercial policy.

Before passing on to other and particularly
later appreciations of federalism, let us turn to
the other side of the matter. Englishmen,
whether they defended the colonists or opposed
them, were likely to take refuge in insular (i. e.,
English) law, not discussing the question openly
as to whether Parliament had become imperial,
or whether, if it had, its power was unlimited;
blank assertion took the place of argument.^
They occasionally spoke learnedly or super-
ficially of v/hether places without the realm
could be taxed, or whether such places must be
brought within the realm and given representa-
tion before they could be taxed ; and thus, in re-

^ Special exceptions should of course be made. Thomas
Pownall, in his Administration of the Colonies (London, 1764
and later amplified editions), struggles to find expression. Of
course there were others. Vide, for example, Johnstone's
Speech on . . . recommitting the address, etc. (London, 1776).

AMERICAN FEDERALISM 199

ferring to past conditions in the history of
Britain, they really recognized the fact that
even Britain herself had been a growth and had
been compounded, but curiously enough they
were blind to the composite empire already in
existence and to the practises of a century. The
freedom from taxation they discussed from the
viewpoint of insular institutions, and, as the
world knows, made the ludicrous blunder of at-
tempting to impute the insular system of repre-
sentation to the whole empire. They fumbled
with the whole principle of representation; but
their chief error was the insistence on applying
to the whole empire certain rigid principles
which they believed were logically irrefutable.
Scarcely any one of them saw that in the de-
velopment of empire had arisen new principles
of law and organization. Of course they re-
jected the distinction between internal taxation
and external taxation, as there may have been
reason for doing on practical as well as the-
oretical grounds; from the beginning they de-
nied the possibility of classification of powers;
they asserted the indivisible character of legis-
lative power, and almost at once took a posi-
tion which, if insisted on in practise, left noth-
ing to the colonists but a choice between ac-
ceptance of an absolute government at the head

■^

200 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

of a centralized empire on the one hand, and the
total denial of all parliamentary authority on
the other.^

The pamphlet entitled The Controversy Be-
tween Great Britain and her Colonies, commonly
attributed to the pen of William Knox, probably
deserves the praise bestowed upon it as being
the best presentation of Britain ^s case.^ It is
true that in one flagrant instance it falsely jug-
gles with Locke's second essay, and it shows
more than usual cunning in making Locke's the-
ories support governmental authority; but the
argument from the history of Parliament and
the empire to support the claim for imperial
authority is able and has the strength of his-
torical statement as contradistinguished from
bald assertion and adroit legalism. Knox, how-
ever, has a merry time with Dickinson, proving
to his own satisfaction the folly of distinguish-
ing between taxation and regulation of com-
merce ; and he thus fails utterly to see anything
but a centralized empire with all authority in
Parliament. ** There is no alternative: either
the colonies are a part of the community of

* Pitt's statement distinguishing taxation from legislation
ia omitted from this discussion in the text. See for partial sup-
port of position above Grenville, Speech of January 14, 1766.
Pari. Hist., XVI, 101. See also Ibid., 167.

* Except Hutchinson's speeches of 1773.

AMERICAN FEDERALISM 201

Great Britain, or they are in a state of nature
with respect to her, and in no case can be sub-
ject to the jurisdiction of that legislative power
which represents her community, which is the
British Parliament. ' ' Nothing could more fully
discredit legalism when dealing with a prac-
tical problem of statesmanship ; this was deny-
ing that Parliament could not recognize the il-
legality of doing what in practise it actually had
not done and what the passing years were prov-
ing it could in reality not do.^ — 1

Even before 1770 many American opponents
of parliamentary taxation had been hurried
along to the position in which they denied that
Parliament possessed any power over them.^
It would appear, however, that the more sober-
minded did not as yet openly go so far ; it was
easy for the thoughtless to resent British as-
sertion of authority by the simple denial of all

*In a pamphlet attributed to Phelps, The Eights of the
colonies and the extent of the legislative authority of Great
Britain briefly stated and considered (1769), pp. 11 and 12,
we find : ' * The colonies, therefore, must either acknowledge
the legislative power of Great Britain in its full extent, or set
themselves up as independent states; I say in its full extent,
because if there be any reserve in their obedience, which they
can legally claim, they must have a power within themselves
superior to that of the mother country; for her obedience to the
legislature is without limitation." Winsor says Phelps was
Under-Secretary to Lord Sandwich. Narr. and Crit. Hist.,
VI, 85.

^See for example J. K. Hosmer, Life of Thomas Hutchin-
son, 134.

202 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

authority. There is no such declaration, how-
ever, in the American state papers. There was
still readiness, as there continued to be after
1770, to acquiesce in British regulation of the
trade of the empire, and in such royal control
as was consistent with practise and the charters.
In 1770 when the long controversy arose be-
tween Hutchinson and the Massachusetts leg-
islature over the right to remove the legisla-
ture to Cambridge, Hutchinson declared that
the Boston men, having denied the power of
Parliament over them, were now prepared to
deny the power of the crown. It is perfectly
true that that controversy concerned the power
of the crown; it involved the question whether
the prerogative could be used freely and arbi-
trarily and in disregard of established laws and
the charter but certainly till that time the colo-
nists had not committed themselves to the doc-
trine that Parliament was totally powerless, nor
did they then deny in toto the authority of the
crown. As before 1770 they had asserted that
there were bounds to the authority of Parlia-
ment, so now they rejected the notion that suffi-
cient excuse for a governor's acts was his sim-
ple declaration that he had received orders from
Westminster. Even in the exercise of the pre-
rogative, there must be recognition of the legal

AMERICAN FEDERALISM 203

entity and tlie legal competence of the colony
as an integral portion of an integral empire;
that was the position of the Massachusetts leg-
islature translated into modem terms.

Students of the Revolution that believe the
movement was economic in origin, character and
purpose, may not deny that, after 1768, Parlia-
ment had no express hope or intention of ob-
taining revenue from America. From that time
on, British interest was largely, if not wholly,
confined to asserting parliamentary omnipo-
tence, or, if this seems too strong, confined to
an insistence upon the supreme power of Par-
liament and to resisting what they believed, un-
der the tutelage of American governors, was a
conscious tendency toward independence. In-
deed, especially after 1768, but to a consider-
able extent from 1766, the question was not so
much whether the colonies would pay taxes as
whether they would acknowledge the legal ob-
ligation; and to an amazing extent the conflict
was over the existence or non-existence of an
abstract right. As we have already seen, much
of the colonial argument was in defense of in-
dividual liberty, not of states rights; but the
center of the controversy was whether or not
Parliament was possessed of limitless author-
ity.

204 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

The colonists at least claimed to be satisfied
with the old regime, in which power had been
divided, and in which Parliament had chiefly
shown its power by the regulation of trade.^
The parliamentarians insisted that in the law
of the empire the will of Parliament was noth-
ing more nor less than supreme and all-inclu-
sive. The colonists insisted, though they did
not use this phraseology, that old practises of
the empire were the law of the empire and thus,
in modern phraseology, they demanded the rec-
ognition of a composite empire based on law.
Even if we admit the presence of many eco-
nomic and social forces, we find in actual con-
flict two theories of imperial order; and in this
discussion after 1768, if not before, the English
parliamentarians and pamphleteers were vic-
tims of certain dogmas of political science curi-

* ' ' Every advantage that could arise from commerce they
have offered us without reserve; and their language to us has
been — 'Restrict us, as much as you please in acquiring property
by regulating our trade to your advantage; but claim not the
disposal of that property after it has been acquired — Be satis-
fied with the authority you exercised over us before the present
Reign.' " Additional Observations on the nature and value
of Civil Liberty, and the War with America, by Richard Price.

''And when men are driven for wnnt of argument, they fly
to this as their last resource — 'acts of parliament (say their
advocates) are sacred, and should be implicitly submitted to — •
for if the supreme power does not lodge somewhere operatively,
and effectually, there must be an end of all legislation.' "
Lord Chatham's Speech on the 20th of January, 1775. Taken
by a member, page 9 (1775).

AMERICAN FEDERALISM 205

ously similar to the doctrine of indivisible sov-
ereignty.^ How often did Burke deprecate the
continual harping on Parliament's authority, on
the necessity of acknowledging the theoretical
supremacy of Parliament.^ He deplored the
common talk about the legal rights. Beyond
Burke's speeches little needs be cited to show

* If, intemperately, unwisely, fatally, you sophisticate and
poison the very source of government by urging subtle deduc-
tions and consequences odious to those you govern from the
unlimited and illimitable nature of sovereignty, you will teach
them by those means to call that sovereignty itself in question.
When you drive him hard the boar will turn upon the hunters.
If that sovereignty and their freedom cannot be reconciled,
which will they take? They will cast your sovereignty in your
face, nobody will be argued into slavery. ' ' Burke ' * Speech on
American Taxation," Works, vol. II, p. 73. See also Ibid., pp.
141-142, for Burke's wishing to see the colonies admitted to
an interest in the constitution, an evidence that he too recog-
nized in some measure the need of formal statement.

^An illustration of the same thing may be seen in an
American source:

''Moreover, when we consider that Parliamentary taxations
are not as to their present value, a matter of moment, either to
the mother country, or the colonies; that the contention between
us is upon the points of principle and precedent; that it is
not the quantum, but the manner of exacting our unconstitu-
tional impost, which is the bone of contention, our public
jealousies must necessarily be increased.

"When the taxation was more general, there was some
colour for the assertion in the Revenue Act, that it was in-
tended for the safety and defence of the colonies. But it is
not only true, that this cannot be asserted of the paltry duty
on tea; we know, we were assured by our enemies, that when
the other articles charged by the Revenue Acts were exempted
by the partial repeal, the duty on tea was left as a standing
memorial of the right of Parliament to tax Americans. ' ' Force,
Archives, Fourth Series, I, 256 note — copied from the Neio York
Gazetteer, May 12, 1774.

206 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

the essentially legalistic character of the whole
discussion.

It may be rash to assert that the colonists
were less insistent upon knowing what the con-
stitution of the empire was than were the Eng-
lishmen, though there seems no reason to doubt
that the colonists would have willingly accepted
the old practise as sufficient, if it were not
threatened. Still, the colonists desired to know
precisely what were American rights; and in
this respect possibly America was more legal-
istic than Britain, because Parliament insisted
on the existence of unlimited power — asserted,
one might not unjustly say, that Parliament
was above the law — while the colonists asserted
that Parliament was bound by rigid law. * ^ The
patchwork government of America,'' wrote Ber-
nard in 1765,^ ^^will last no longer; the neces-
sity of a parliamentary establishment of the
governments of America upon fixed constitu-
tional principles, is brought out with a precipi-
tation which could not have been foreseen but a
year ago; and is become more urgent, by the
very incidents which make it more difficult.''
At this time, it will be remembered, he proposed
an extraordinary Parliament, in which there
were to be American representatives, which

* Select Letters, p. 33.

AMERICAN FEDERALISM 207

should form and establish '^a general and uni-
form system of American government''; ^^and
let the relation of America be determined and
ascertained by a solemn Recognition; so that
the rights of the American governments, and
their subordination to that of Great Britain,
may no longer be a subject of doubt and dispu-
tation.'' In 1766 he declares that *Hhe Stamp
Act is become in itself a matter of indiif erence ;
it is swallowed up in the importance of the ef-
fects of which it has been the cause. . . . And
as the relation between Great Britain and the
colonies has not only been never settled, but
scarce even formally canvassed, it is the less
surprising, that the ideas of it on one side of the
water and on the other are so widely different,
to reconcile these, and to ascertain the nature
of the subjection of the colonies to the crown
of Great Britain, will be a work of time and
difficulty."

There can be little doubt that Bernard was
right ; the problem of the day was the problem
of imperial organization: were Englishmen or
Americans capable of finding a law of the em-
pire? ^ If so, that law must be consonant with

*By *Maw" I do not mean that there was a demand for a
parliamentary act; I mean at the least an evident understand-
ing, at the most a formal acknowledgment of power and the

208 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

practical realities ; it must be a formulation of
the principles of relationship which recognized
not centralization but distribution.^ As an in-
dication of the fact that men were discussing
legal rights, and losing sight of financial re-
turns, it may be sufficient for the earlier days to
refer to the comments in the Parliament ar^^
History ^ on the debate about the Circular Let-
ter. It was insisted by opponents of the min-
istry in debate on the Massachusetts Circular
Letter and in respect to the revenue laws * ' that
the inutility of these laws was so evident, that
the ministers did not even pretend to support
them upon that ground, but rested their defense

extent of it, a formal recognition of the complete authority of
Parliament or, on the other hand, of the width and depth of
the actual colonial legal competence.

^ It is plain, too, that Hutchinson, a legal-minded man, also
felt in the days of Bernard's governorship, as later, that the
constitution must be settled. * ' I wish to see known, established
principles, one general rule of subjection, which once acknowl-
edged, any attempts in opposition to them will be more easily
crushed." Letter of April 21, 1766, quoted in Quincy Beports,
443-444. "Our misfortune is the different apprehension of
the nature and degree of our dependence. I wish to see it
settled, known, and admitted; for while the rules of law are
vague and uncertain, especially in such fundamental points, our
condition is deplorable in general." Letter of December 31,
1766, Hosmer's Hutchinson, p. 121.

Only one other question — and that intimately associated
with the first — vied with it in importance: Were there or
were there not rooted in the British constitution fundamental
principles of individual liberty superior to legislative authority
and must they be recognized in the British legislation for
colonial affairs?

^ XVI, p. 488.

AMERICAN FEDERALISM 209

upon the expediency of establishing the right of
taxation.'* And if we turn again to Dickinson,
we find the same thing in a different guise — the
necessity of law in the empire — not a law secur-
ing centralized authority but freedom. There
could be no freedom without legal restriction:
**For who are a free people? Not those, over
whom government is reasonably and equitably
exercised, but those, who live under a govern-
ment so constitutionally checked and controlled
that proper provision is made against its being
otherwise exercised."^

We might wisely spend much time in consid-
ering the dispute in 1770 already referred to —
the dispute as to whether instructions could
ipso facto dispose of all matters of constitu-
tional right of the colonies, or whether even the
crown was limited in imperial authority by the
fact of the existence of competent and legally
recognized colonial legislatures. But passing
over those three years or so of legalistic dis-
pute, let us come to ^Hhe great controversy'* of
1773. In considering this we can echo John
Adams' expression of amazement at Hutchin-
son's audacity in throwing down the gauntlet.
The truth probably is that Hutchinson had been
grievously tried for years, not alone by what he

^Memoirs of the Eistorical Society of Penn., XIV, p. 356.

^

210 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

considered the unmannerly conduct of the rab-
ble, but by the doctrines which he heard in the
market place and perhaps in legislative halls.
He believed that the theories of the malcontents
were unsound and that he in the plenitude of his
wisdom could establish their invalidity ; and he
prepared therefore to bring his heaviest artil-
lery to bear upon the unreasoning followers of
Samuel Adams and against the arch agitator
himself. What he wished to do, be it noticed,
was to demolish a false theory of the empire and
bring every one to acknowledge, not the wisdom
of obnoxious legislation, but the legal authority
of Parliament. By this time doubtless there
was much talk about complete freedom from
parliamentary control, but there had been little
if any formal public announcement by the radi-
cals of anything more than a freedom from taxa-
tion.

Hutchinson, it must be said, had considerable
reason for having confidence in his massed at-
tack ; for his argument was able and compelling,
serving by its weight to bring into play all the
open and masked batteries of the opposition.
He finally reached in his first paper a position
from which he believed he could discharge one
final and conclusive volley ; he was prepared to
use an undeniable principle of political science ;

AMERICAN FEDERALISM 211

he believed he could silence his enemies with
its mere pronouncement : **It is impossible there
should be two independent Legislatures in the
one and the same state/* ^ Despite all the dis-
cussion that had gone on, despite the fact that
Britain had been practising federalism, Hutch-
inson could see nothing but the theory of cen-
tralized legislative omnipotence and could not
conceive of distribution of power between mu-
tually independent legislative bodies. And yet
this undeniable axiom of political science was to
be proved untrue in the course of fifteen years
by the establishment of fourteen independent
legislatures in the single federal state, the
United States of America.

The two branches of the legislature met
Hutchinson's general argument somewhat dif-
ferently. The house argued valiantly for com-
plete freedom from parliamentary control; in
facing the alternative of complete freedom from
Parliament and complete subservience, they un-
hesitatingly chose the former, though they did
seem to recognize the possibility of drawing a
line between the supreme authority of Parlia-
ment and total independence.^ The council,

* Mass. State Papers, p. 340.

^ That is to say, they did not deny the possibility of dis-
tribution and a line of distinction between governments in the
empire. ' ' And, indeed, it is difficult, if possible, to draw a line

212 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

wiser and more conservative than the house, an-
nounced federalism; they contended that the
colony had ** property in the privileges granted
to it/' i. e., an indefeasible legal title: ^*But,
as in fact, the two powers are not incompatible,
and do subsist together, each restraining its acts
to their constitutional objects, can we not from
hence, see how the supreme power may super-
vise, regulate, and make general laws for the
kingdom, without interfering with the privileges
of the subordinate powers within it T ' ^ This

of distinction between the universal authority of Parliament
over the colonies, and no authority at all. " ' * If your Excel-
lency expects to have the line of distinction between -the su-
preme authority of Parliament, and the total independence of
the colonies drawn by us, we would say it would be an arduous
undertaking, and of very great importance to all the other
colonies; and therefore, could we conceive of such a line, we
should be unwilling to propose it, without their consent in Con-
gress. ' ' Hosmer, Hutchinson, pp. 382, 395.

^ Hosmer, Hutchinson, p. 412. It will not do to argue that
they meant, by "subordinate," subject to the whim and con-
trol of Parliament; for that is just what they were arguing
against. They denied that supremacy meant complete unlimited
power, or that subordination meant unlimited submission. Of
course * * coordinate ' ' is more nearly expressive of federalism
than "subordinate"; but the principle these men had in mind
is that of distribution, legal distribution, by which the parts
legally control local affairs, a general government regulates
and safeguards general affairs.

I omit, to save space, the extended argument, but I must
call attention to their assertion of legal possession of constitu-
tional right by the colonies as integral portions of the empire,
and also to their declaration, in a delicate manner, that Hutch-
inson was dealing with theories and disregarding the fact, and
that fact was the distribution of powers not centralization:
"What has been here said (i. e., by Hutchinson), concerning
supreme authority, has no reference to the manner in which it

AMERICAN FEDERALISM 213

is a clear, precise and thorough description of
federalism. It is plain enough, then, that there
were some clear-headed men, who, in the years
just before the final break with England, were
not silenced by the fulminations of British pam-
phleteers or the dogmatic assertions of Hutch-
inson into a belief that the empire was simple
and unitary; nor were they as yet ready to ac-
cept the learned and technical argument of John
Adams, though buttressed by pedantic reference
to Calvin's case, that the empire was held to-
gether by the king, a personal union only.

The American theory of federalism is stated
with such amazing accuracy in an answer to
Doctor Johnson's Taxation No Tyranny,^ that
it deserves quotation at considerable length:

*'Now this, in abstract, sounds well. When
we speak of the Legislature of a community,
we suppose only one Legislature; and where
there is but one, it must of necessity have the
right you speak of; otherwise, no taxes at all
could be raised in that community. . . . Now
the present dispute is not with respect to this

has been, in fact, exercised ; but is wholly confined to its general
nature.'^ Ibid., p. 413. These arguments are also to be found
in Mass. State Papers, as well as in the appendix to Hosmer's
Hutchi/nson.

• A n answer to a Pamphlet entitled ' ' Taxation No
Tyranny," found in Force's American Archives, Fourth Series,
I, 1450, latter part of paragraph on p. 1451.

V

214 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

Island alone, wliich certainly has but one Legis-
lature, but with respect to the British Empire
at large, in which there are many Legislatures ;
or many Assemblies claiming to be so. . . .
From the state of the British Empire, composed
of extensive and dispersed Dominions, and from
the nature of its Government, a multiplicity of
Legislatures, or of Assemblies claiming to be
so, have arisen in one Empire. It is in some de-
gree a new case in legislation, and must be gov-
erned therefore more by its own circumstances,
and by the genius of our peculiar Constitution,
than by abstract notions of Government at
large. Every Colony, in fact, has two Legisla-
tures, one interiour and Provincial, viz.: the
Colony Assembly; the other exteriour and
imperial, viz.: the British Parliament. . . .
Neither will the unity of the Empire be in dan-
ger from the Provincial Legislature being thus
exclusive as to points. It is perfectly sufiQcient,
if the British Legislature be supreme as to all
those things which are essential to Great
Britain^ s being substantially the head of the
Empire ; a line not very difficult to be drawn, if
it were the present subject. Neither is there
any absurdity in there being two Assemblies,
each of them sufficient, or, if you will, supreme,
as to objects perfectly distinct; for this plain

AMERICAN FEDERALISM 215

reason, that the objects being perfectly distinct,
they cannot clash. The Colonist, therefore, al-
lowing that the supreme power or Legislature,
where there is but one, must have the right you
speak of, will say that with respect to him, there
are two, and that the Provincial Legislature is
the supreme power as to taxation for his Colony.
And so the controversy, notwithstanding your
position, will remain just where it began."

The discussions in the Continental Congress
of 1774 show us the trouble that the colonists
had in reaching a satisfactory theory. By that
time many had come to the conclusion that Par-
liament possessed no power to pass laws govern-
ing the colonies. But the situation and the ex-
perience were too plain, and Congress **from
the necessities of the case" announced that par-
liamentary regulation of trade would be ac-
cepted, but not taxation external or internal.
They proposed as a working basis for the whole
system — perhaps no longer to be termed an em-
pire if there was no legislature with any im-
perial power legally speaking — the distinction
between taxation and regulation of commerce,
and they really put themselves back, as far as
practise was concerned, nearly if not quite in
the position of eleven years before. It cannot
be supposed, as they accepted the king as their

216 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

king, that the Congress of 1774 would deny the
general right of the mother country, through
the executive head, to make war and peace, man-
age diplomacy, hold the back lands, control In-
dian affairs and probably the post office — in
other words, to exercise the significant powers
bestowed on the central government of the
United States under our Constitution. They
were prepared to acknowledge a political order,
in which all the great powers bestowed on our
central government under the Constitution with
the exception of the power to tax should be in
the hands of the central authorities at Westmin-
ster; and they evidently accepted and promul-
gated the possibility of distribution of power.^

* I have not attempted in this paper to cite all the instances
of an appreciation of the fact that the discussion was over the
possibility of distribution of power in the empire. Let me
refer to a letter of Gouverneur Morris to Mr, Penn, May 20,
1774. It speaks of the danger of America's falling "under the
worst of all possible dominions . . . the domination of a riot-
ous mob," and then proposes "a safe compact" between the
"colonies and the mother country," "internal taxation," i. e.,
"to be left with ourselves," "the right of regulating trade to
be vested in Great Britain." Of course the compact was to
form the legal and binding authority for the exercise of power.
Force, American Archives, Fourth Series, I, 342-343.

Notice also that the Pennsylvania Convention of 1774 speaks
of the desirability of agreements with Great Britain; she is
to renounce certain claims and America is to accept certain
statutes; money is to be given to the king. It also dwells on
the compact which has to do largely with trade: "With such
parts of the world only as she has appointed us to deal, we
shall continue to deal; and such commodities only as she has
permitted us to bring from them, we shall continue to bring.

AMERICAN FEDERALISM 217

In drawing np the Declaration of Independ-
ence the Continental Congress accepted the the-
ory that Parliament had had no legal authority
over them; but the Articles of Confederation
were drawn on the principle of distribution of
powers. Of course it may properly be said that
the Articles did not provide for the creation of
an imperial state. If, however, we look to see
how far they carried on the actual distribution
which had existed in practise in the old empire,
we see much in common between the empire and
the Confederation. We do not find in the new
system, of course, any right in the Congress —
the new central authority — to exercise some of
the functions formerly exercised by the crown
in council; there was no right to appoint gov-
ernors, or to instruct them, or to disapprove of
the state laws. But the great powers of war
and peace, foreign affairs, the post office and
Indian affairs belonged to Congress ; and it was
understood before adoption that the tremen-
dously important matter of the ownership of the

The executive and controlling powers of the crown will retain
their present full force and operation." Ihid., 561. Vide
also among others plans, Proposal for a Plan toward a
Peconciliation and Reunion, etc., by one of the Public (London,
1778).

I omit in this paper mention of various plans of imperial
order. They are important as disclosures of effort to distribute
powers on a legal basis.

218 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

back lands, and the administration of the back
settlements — in other words, the extension of
the empire — was to be in the hands of Congress.
Only a detailed examination would show how
much of the old practical system of the empire
was formulated in the Articles. It is sufficient
now to say, and it is quite unnecessary to say
it, that very much of the old system was there
formulated, and the Articles carried on very
distinctly the principle of distribution of pow-
ers and on the whole provided for governments
with distinct spheres of action.^ A student of
the Articles will of course be carried back to the
Albany plan and even to the New England Con-
federacy of 1643; but he will be hopelessly at
sea unless he grasps the fact that the contents
of the document are distinctly the products of
imperial history, and they constitute, (1) the
first quasi-legal formulation of imperial exist-
ence, (2) the immediate preparation for ulti-
mate real and full formulation in the Constitu-
tion.

The two powers of which there had been much
discussion in the ten years before independence
were not adequately provided for in the Con-
federation. Congress, the new general govern-

^ Even the system of admiralty jurisdiction was carried for-
ward through the Articles into the Constitution of the United
States.

AMERICAN FEDERALISM 219

ment, was not given the right to raise money by
taxation, the Articles accepting the principle of
requisitions which the colonists as part of the
British empire had insisted on. Everybody
knows that requisitions proved a failure in the
new system, and this fact in a way gave a tardy
justice to the arguments of the parliamentarians
in the days before the Revolution. It is more
surprising, however, that Congress was not
given the right to regulate trade, inasmuch as,
almost to the last, the colonies had either openly
acknowledged parliamentary authority in the
matter or openly professed a willingness to ac-
quiesce in the practical exercise of such author-
ity. The failure to grant the authority to Con-
gress shows how particularism had grown, or
it discloses an inability to see that the need of
imperial regulation of trade was just as vital in
the new system as in the old. Because Congress
did not possess these two powers, taxation and
regulation of commerce, the Confederation
proved a failure.

The Confederation might very well, we may
suppose, have proved a failure even if Congress
had been given these two essential powers. As
to that little or nothing need be said ; it is a very
old story; the states suffered from the natural
effects of a Revolution, and, had Congress had

220 AMERICA AND BRITAIN

authority on paper, license and particularistic
folly might have made it impossible to go on,
until the natural reaction in favor of national-
ism and order set in. However that may be,
these two powers had to be bestowed, conditions
proved it ; and in the new Constitution Congress
was given power to tax for national purposes
and to regulate commerce. The principle of
federalism was recognized, formulated and
legalized in the Constitution; the new govern-
ment was given its distinct sphere of action and
was made the recipient of a body of powers,
carefully named and carefully deposited in their
proper places; but in the selection and deposi-
tion little needed to be done but to follow the
practises of the old British colonial system.

The Convention of 1787 had difficulty in see-
ing the whole complicated scheme as a working
mechanism; but how could the members pos-
sibly have imagined it at all, or provided for the
scheme which in its essentials was the basis of
federalism the world over, without the aid of the
historical forces and the old practises? Save
perhaps with the old troublesome problem of
the militia, the military question in the federal
state, they had little trouble in determining what
should be the distribution and classification of
powers. Their chief difficulty was again the old

AMERICAN FEDERALISM 221

one — colonial disobedience, which was now state
willfulness ; and this difficulty was surmounted,
as we know, by firm adherence to the principle
of distinction between local and general author-
ity, and by recognizing that each governmental
authority was competent and supreme within its
own sphere and had the legal power to enforce
its lawful acts on its own citizens. Perhaps
both parts of this principle of cohesion and of
authority — of cohesion because of division, and
of authority because of immediate operation —
were inherited from the old empire; certainly
the former one was.

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