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of 1898. But though, as the result of this war, the United States became possessed for the first time of an overseas empire, the beginnings of American imperialism must be set much further back. The dream of expansion, which is the essence of imperialism, was indeed present from the outset. Alexander Hamilton looked forward to the day when the United States, an indivisible nation, would occupy the whole of North America and exercise the hegemony of the Western Hemisphere. His great democratic opponent, Thomas Jefferson, shared this ideal, and took the first step towards its realization by the purchase in 1803 of the vast and ill-defined territory of Louisiana. The imperialism of John Quincey Adams was equally pronounced. During the negotiations at Ghent, in 1814, he was with difficulty prevented by his colleagues from proposing to the British commissioners the cession of Canada to the United States. He was the true and only begetter of the Monroe Doctrine, not only in its original purity as a doctrine of defence, but in its later development as a doctrine of domination. He was the first great Pan-American; but his Pan-Americanism did not imply any idea of partnership with the Latin States. When the Portuguese minister proposed to him that the United States and Portugal," as the two Great Powers in the Western Hemisphere," should concert "a grand American system," the idea struck him as ludicrous. As for an American system," he wrote in his diary, "we have it; we constitute the whole of it."

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We have thus, very early in the century, the consciousness of the "manifest destiny" of the United States, which was to become extremely vocal in the 'forties and 'fifties, and the imperial spirit which was to find its extreme expression, at the time of the Venezuela boundary dispute, in the declaration of Secretary Olney that "to-day the United States is practically sovereign on this continent and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition." From the first, too, there was the contradiction between profession and practice which the unregenerate have noted even in the policies of Woodrow Wilson. President Jefferson had doubtless shared Richard Henry Lee's indignation at the "European spirit of partition" and "the assumed right of disposing of men and countries like live stock on a farm."* It was he who was responsible for the famous

*Ballagh," Letters of Richard Henry Lee," I. 177.

principle that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Yet he bought Louisiana without consulting its inhabitants, and he governed them without their consent; he said, very truly, that they were "as incapable of selfgovernment as children."

He thought it necessary, indeed, to justify this very justifiable piece of Realpolitik in his own eyes and those of his Radical friends in England, who would be apt to think it inconsistent with the pure doctrine of democracy. He therefore wrote to Dr. Priestley to explain that it was " in no spirit of imperialism" that he looked upon this vast acquisition of territory. Nor was it in this spirit, presumably, that he acquired the Floridas from a reluctant Spain, cast covetous eyes on Cuba " as the most interesting addition that could ever be made to our system of States," and looked forward to the time when the United States would exercise an effective control over the Gulf of Mexico and the Isthmus of Panama. "Our interests," he said, " will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties "—a sentiment which, repeated by successive Presidents and Secretaries of State, found its supreme expression in the " Wilson Doctrine." It has not prevented LatinAmerican patriots from roundly denouncing the policy which it hallowed as "Yankee Imperialism."

Before proceeding further, it may be well to make clear that I have no intention of suggesting that the imperialistic tendencies of the United States are, in themselves, either unnatural or morally wrong. Every strong nation, as Mr. Inman points out, is imperialistic, in the sense of desiring either to extend its territories or to control, in one form or another, the weaker and more backward peoples which hamper its development. Thus the British Empire grew, the "moral duties" coming later. Thus, too, the United States grew; and if in the process of this growth the great Republic did not develop into a militarist Power, this was due, not to any exceptional virtue in the American democracy, but to the fact that in the western hemisphere there was no strong Power to resist its advance. "We have not always (says Mr. Weyl) subordinated our national interests to the ideal of setting a righteous example. . . . What we did need we could take from weak peoples, and a nation which fights weak peoples need not be martial, just as a man who robs orphans need not be a thug."

The late Professor Bushnell Hart said much the same thing.

In the foreground of the imperialist nations he placed the United States," with her natural desire to enlarge in area, in spirit, and in influence upon the world."* The earlier expansions, he said, had been due to economic factors similar to those which determined the imperialism of other peoples: "the United States had the same reason for reaching the Gulf Coast and the mouth of the Mississippi that the Russians have for desiring control of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles as an outlet." If there was any difference between the imperial expansion of the United States and that of other nations it lay in the fact that " with few exceptions the United States has obtained what she wanted without war." In her quarrels with her neighbours her method of action had usually been that of "writing paper mixed with possible blood,"§ and the difficulty of persuading the Americans that, if they were to maintain their imperial pretensions, they must become "more or less military," lay in the fact that hitherto the method of writing paper had proved adequate. It proved adequate, Mr. Hart suggests, merely because no great Power ever thought it worth while to call the bluff. Writing as he did before the United States had come into the world war, he pointed out that a victorious Germany would probably be both willing and able to do so.

In principle, then, there is not a pin to choose between British and American imperialism, whatever difference there may be in their methods; mutual recrimination is therefore idle. So far as the English people are concerned, this moral was pointed very clearly more than a hundred years ago by Richard Rush, then United States Minister in London. He notes in his diary how, on March 25, 1819, when the news reached England of the signature at Madrid of the treaty ceding the Floridas to the United States, the newspapers raised a great clamour, "charging rapacity and ambition upon the United States." The amiable diplomatist, whose love and reverence for England the recent war had not quenched, was cut to the quick. "Even if we were to show some tincture of this quality," he comments sorely, " still, as England's own children, disposed to act in her own spirit, the journalists might make allowances." That is true enough, and of late years the Americans have had little to complain of in this respect. The American politician still thinks it proper, on occasion, to point out the imperialistic mote in his British brother's eye. It has

"Monroe Doctrine," p. 368.
+Ib. p. 309. Ib. p. 387. §Ib. p. 325.

been left, in the main, to Americans to point out the imperialistic beam in the American's own eye.

It was after the Spanish-American War that an uneasy sense of the contradiction between traditional principles and modern practice in American foreign policy began to spread among the educated classes in the United States, finding expression in a copious literature. The new imperialism, it was noted, introduced a new principle wholly alien to the spirit of the Federal Constitution. There had, it is true, been earlier annexations of foreign territory, whether by purchase or conquest; but hitherto such territory had always sooner or later been absorbed into the system of the United States. But this was now altered. "Seventeen years ago," wrote Mr. Bushnell Hart in 1915, " there was not a community within the control of the United States (except the District of Columbia) which was not a State or in the way to become a State. Now there are eight such lands, or groups." This was not the result of any deliberate policy. It was the outcome of the war which made the United States, willy-nilly, the residuary legatee of the perished Empire of Spain. Incidentally, it made the United States an Imperial Power in much the same sense as Great Britain. "The United States," wrote Mr. Bushnell Hart, "is a Canal Power, a Pacific Power and an Asiatic Power."

This revolution, which—as Mr. Hart was not alone in pointing out-blew into space the principle of the separation of the two spheres consecrated by the Monroe Doctrine, met, and still meets, with strong criticism from all those Americans-and they are many-who still regard this Doctrine as containing all the law and the prophets, and hold, with more reason, that the position of the United States in the Philippines or Porto Rico is in flat contradiction to the democratic principles on which the Republic is founded. We English have certainly no right to join in this outcry; but we may perhaps be forgiven if we listen to it with just a touch of malicious satisfaction. We, too, have ensued liberty, and at times we have made the mistake of thinking that the forms of liberty which suit ourselves must be equally suitable for other peoples. But we never made the mistake of committing ourselves as a nation to the dogmatic assertion that the only just form of government is self-government. We learned by experience, long since, a lesson which of late years American statesmen have also learned. It was well summed up by Mr. Elihu Root, then Secretary of State, in defending the American administration of the

Philippines against the Democrats, who denounced it as a violation of the principles of the Declaration of Independence. "The right to government," he said," is prior to the right to self-government."

Now the principle thus enunciated, though sound enough in itself and justified in its application to particular cases like that of the Philippines, has the demerit of being somewhat elastic, and may thus be stretched to cover cases to which its application is not so obviously justifiable. In this respect British imperialism has often been accused of sinning, and by none more loudly than by the Americans. It cannot surprise us, then, that the United States, having developed an imperial power, is now exposed to similar charges. The outcry of the Filipinos, though it has found an echo in the United States, may be treated as of no great practical importance. That of the Latin-Americans, on the other hand, which has been loud and persistent, is less negligible, and the criticisms of American imperialism published during recent years in the United States have been mainly directed against the policies which have provoked it, and notably against those modern developments of the Monroe Doctrine which have done most to excite Latin-American hostility.

This hostility, and the fears which inspire it, are easy enough to understand. Latin-Americans had not forgotten President Polk, the ablest diplomatist of his time, under whose inspiration "the United States began systematically to re-arrange the map of North America at the expense of her neighbours."* They remembered the Mexican War of 1846, which added Texas, New Mexico and California to the United States, and so served notice on all the world "that, while the United States felt bound to prevent aggressions by European countries upon Latin-American States, she recognized no such obligation upon herself." They remembered the years that followed, when the " manifest destiny" of the giant Republic to expand without limit was proclaimed in the press, on political platforms and even in Presidential messages.‡

*Bushnell Hart, p. 112.

†Ib. p. 120. (e.g.) President Buchanan in 1856 (Rippy, p. 27). In 1853, Senator Douglas, of Illinois, while opposing the ClaytonBulwer Treaty, exclaimed that " you may make as many treaties as you please to fetter the limits of this giant Republic, and she will burst them all from her, and her course will be onward to a limit which I will not venture to prescribe. . . ." This resembles the pre-war political idealism of Imperial Germany.

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