GREAT BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES

-INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS.

I.

IPLOMACY never has amounted to much in the United

States. It has never flourished here. It is an exotic. It does not seem to be congenial with our soil. From the first start the Thirteen Colonies substituted Statesmanship for Diplomacy-straight forward talk and honest dealing for intrigue and lies. This accounts for our having got on so well. We never told a lie to a foreign nation, and we never made a threat that we did not carry out. Our Government does not hold a rood of ground that we did not come by honestly. We never robbed or filched from our neighbors. All we have we bought by fair bargain, or we inherited from our fathers. We have never kept an acre of conquered soil. We even refused to accept Mexico when she begged us to take her. Her sensible men and her people generally wanted to come into our Union. They knew their country was of no use to themselves. They were torn, distracted, a prey to anarchy; they were tired; with the richest country in the world, they were a pauper people. Mexico was the poorhouse of the nations.

II.

ES, Mexico was an object of compassion; but we could not help her just then; we had as much business to do at home as we could attend to, and as things turned out it was very well. It does not do for a prosperous, hard-working man, with a large family, to undertake the settlement of a bankrupt estate

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MEANING OF THE MONROE DOCTRINE.

for a neighbor. We did what we could, however, for poor Mexico. Instead of taking her whole country, we agreed on a part useful to us and worthless to her, paying for it the same sum we had paid to France for the vast territory of Louisiana. France has since, without being invited, undertaken the thankless, expensive and perilous job of settling Mexico's affairs. In the invasion of Mexico, Imperialism threw down the gauntlet at the feet of American Democracy. It was a bold and desperate thing to do. But Napoleon saw it could be done with impunity just at that time. If we thereby get dragged into a collision with our old ally, the French people, which no American desires, they may thank themselves. It will prove to have been no job of our seeking. As it is, if we have erred at all, it has been in looking inertly on while a neighboring and friendly Republic has been trampled into the dust by foreign invaders, and her citizens taken in battle barbarously put to death in sight of our own flag, planted on our own soil.

NOT

III.

OT so did her sister Republics in South America read the Monroe Doctrine when Spain, the most effete and contemptible of the Old World monarchies, attempted to degrade or destroy Peru and Chili. The neighboring Republics armed for their rescue, and it will end, if such European encroachments continue, in an alliance of all the Governments of the Western World for their mutual protection; when Europe will find out what that little understood thing called the Monroe Doctrine

means.

However strong nations may have grown in former ages by conquest and outrage on feebler States, the history of later times shows that such military and political structures have few of the elements of permanent endurance. It is just as true that no nation, strong or weak, can any longer afford to attempt a great wrong on any one of the family of nations. For all such infractions the guilty party must ultimately suffer.

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International Law is a code for defining the rules of conduct for all nations towards each other; and no member of the Republic of civilized States can violate this code with impunity. The first serious infraction provokes war. From this source all modern, and most ancient wars have arisen. The law of nations applies to independent states just as municipal law applies to individual citizens-for States are only individuals. In this light England has treated us with great unfriendliness.

THE

IV.

HE Law of Empire in the Western World is worth looking after in this connection. It casts light over all our International Relations.

Lord Bacon somewhere says: "Men discover laws; God makes them." Philosophers interrogate Nature, and as fast as they find out her laws they mark the progress of science. The steam-engine, the printing-press, the cotton-gin, the daguerreotype, the magnetic telegraph, each has to be invented or discovered but once. One Columbus is enough for one hemisphere.

It were well if statesmen should act on the same law as applied to the political world; for both systems-the physical, and the moral-came from the same source and are swayed by the same Master. The brain of Shakspere sprang from the same moulding hand that chiselled the gothic peaks of the Alps and painted the last evening's sunset. Certainty of results, the conditions all being complied with, is the physical law of the universe. A thousand Galileos could not make the peasant of the Apennines believe that the sun will not rise tomorrow. Experience has taught him the unvarying order of nature. Why should we stop here and press along our bewildered track through the moral and political world, heedless of laws of action and of States, which just as inevitably control the fortunes of men and the fates of empires?

Let us trace these analogies into the political world, and see

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THE LAW OF ALL EMPIRES.

if we cannot find just the same certainty and precision in results there, that Galileo and Newton discovered in physics, or Shakspere and Alfieri demonstrated in the drama, or Cooper ånd Scott in romance.

The question, then, meets us: What is the law of empire in this New World? There is a law of existence for all beings and all things; from the mote that floats in the sunbeam, to the Bengal tiger in his jungle. Historians have been busy with the general problem of empire from the earliest nations; and Tacitus, Gibbon and Sismondi have helped us to a better interpretation of the law which has controlled the growth and decay of the panoramic commonwealths that have gone by in their solemn movement over the broad fields of history. From such sources we learn that the frequent captivities of the Jews, and the repeated destruction of their gorgeous capital, followed by the carrying away of the whole nation into slavery, did by no means effect their extermination; nor was that work brought about even by the remorseless persecutions to which they have been subjected by every nation under heaven except our own. The sons of Abraham are still a nation, and they are more numerous to-day than they were when they turned their farewell gaze upon the falling towers of Jerusalem. England has at last been compelled to acknowledge the Jews as citizens; and the scattered children of Jacob could to-day send a million of armed men to recover their own land, which has been cruelly robbed from them by Pagans, Othmans, and Christians. Whence sprang this vitality-this power of endurance—which makes them, above all the people of the earth, the eternal nation? They have always been believers in the only true God, and they have never lost their nationality.

V.

E glance at Switzerland, and we learn that she has always been free. The hunted spirit of liberty has always found

WE

a home there. The reason is plain. Among those everlasting

DEMOCRACY THE LAW OF AMERICA.

553

mountains a race of men have been nurtured, amidst the sublimest scenes of the physical creation, where the hardiest characters have been formed, the sternest wills educated, and the deepest love of liberty inspired. Despotism never flourishes among mountains.

Another illustration. France has learned that, although she may conquer, she can never hold in subjection the nations which lie beyond her present boundaries. Those bounds are the Rhine and Alps on the east, the Mediterranean on the south, the Pyrenees on the southwest, and the ocean waters on her western and northern shores. She has often swept over them with her chivalric legions, and, sooner or later, her colors have waved from almost every capital in Europe. But she has generally lost her conquests as rapidly as they were made, and she has always been compelled to retire within her natural boundaries as soon as the tempest of revolution subsided and Europe settled back to its repose.

England may seem to be an exception to this rule; but she only confirms it. She has till recently been long the greatest of the commercial Powers, and Providence gave to her the mission of spreading civilization. This she has done through the four quarters of the globe. But the time came for her to fall under the operation of the same law which fixed the fate of Rome.

England is to-day, however, the mightiest Power in America except our own. She is, in fact, the only European nation that ever stepped on this soil which had all the elements of endurance for governmental control under propitious circumstances to perpetuate it.

This will be apparent as we come to the main point in our argument, which is to show the law of empire in the western hemisphere. It is safe to say that monarchy is the law of government in Europe; and it is quite as safe to say that Democracy is the law of the cis-Atlantic world. for itself. With Europe the case is settled. cannot flourish there for some time to come.

The fact speaks

Republicanism But the days of