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The

Edinburgh Review

JANUARY, 1927

No. 499

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AMERICAN IMPERIALISM

Dollar Diplomacy. By SCOTT NEARING and JOSEPH FREEMAN. George
Allen & Unwin. 1926.

Problems of Pan-Americanism. By SAMUEL GUY INMAN. Allen and
Unwin. 1926.

3. The United States and Mexico. By J. FRED RIPPY. Alfred Knopf. 1926.

4. The Destiny of a Continent. By MANUEL UGARTE. Translated by Catherine Alison Phillips. Alfred Knopf. 1925.

5. America's Foreign Relations. By WILLIS FLETCHER JOHNSON. 2 Vols. Eveleigh Nash.

1917.

6. The Monroe Doctrine. By ALBERT BUSHNELL HART. Duckworth & Co. 1916.

'EN years ago, on January 22, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson delivered the famous address to the Senate, in which he put forward his plan for a peace "without victory," of which the permanence should be guaranteed by " the organized major force of mankind." In doing so he laid down the principles on which such a peace must be established. "No peace can last, or ought to last," he said, "which does not recognize and accept the principle that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that no right anywhere exists to hand peoples about from potentate to potentate as if they were property." He added that, in holding out the expectation that the people and government of the United States would join with the other civilized nations of the world in guaranteeing a peace established on these principles, he spoke with the greater boldness and confidence because it was clear that there was in this promise "no breach with our traditions or our policy as a nation, but a fulfilment rather of all that we have professed or striven for."

VOL. 245. NO. 499.

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The Foreign Offices, as President Wilson complained later, were sceptical as to these expectations-and with reason. The European peoples, on the other hand, and notably the English, accepted with a child-like faith the assurance that he was speaking "the real heart of the American people," only to find that the American people repudiated his spokesmanship with contumely. In spite of the disillusionment caused by this repudiation, and of the strictly business-like attitude since adopted by the American Government towards a poverty-stricken Europe, there are still among us those who regard the Americans as a nation of political idealists, and look for the appearance of the United States on the Genevan stage as a deus ex machina to unravel the tangled plot of the world's affairs and bring to the problem of ensuring peace a new spirit of national altruism. And in this belief they are encouraged by voices from the other side of the Atlantic, which assure them that, if Americans look askance at the League, this is because the Old World has not cast off the old Adam of national concupiscence. Great Britain, it seems, is in this respect looked upon as the chief of sinners. If misunderstandings arise from time to time between the American and British nations, this-as Professor McElroy explained to a London audience last May—is largely due to the fact that " all Americans are trained to distrust and abhor what they call imperialism."*

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This pronouncement calls for examination, since its ambiguity may lead the unwary astray. It may mean only that American babes are still fed on the pure milk of the Declaration of Independence, and so grow up to rejoice in those denunciations of “British Imperialism,” which still form the staple of Independence Day oratory. Or it may mean that " what they call Imperialism is merely the Imperialism of other peoples. Or again, it may only mean that many Americans, like many English people, have a real distrust and abhorrence of all Imperialism, including their own. But, whatever it means, it must not be taken as implying that the American attitude towards world affairs differs essentially from that of any other powerful and expanding nation. For the United States has itself developed an imperial power and an imperial policy.

This fact, as the authors of " Dollar Diplomacy" point out, was first revealed to all the world by the Spanish-American War

*The Times, May 29, 1926.

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