she will thereby practically acknowledge the Monroe Doctrine,
as England has already done. If Germany stay out, then she can't
complain. England and the United States would have only to announce
their intention: there'd be no need to fire a gun. Besides settling
the Mexican trouble, we'd gain much--having had England by our side
in a praise-worthy enterprise. That, and the President's visit[36]
would give the world notice to whom it belongs, and cause it to be
quiet and to go about its proper business of peaceful industry.

Moreover, it would show all the Central and South American States
that we don't want any of their territory, that we will not let
anybody else have any, but that they, too, must keep orderly
government or the great Nations of the earth, will, at our bidding,
forcibly demand quiet in their borders. I believe a new era of
security would come in all Spanish America. Investments would be
safer, governments more careful and orderly. And--we would not have
made any entangling alliance with anybody. All this would prevent
perhaps dozens of little wars. It's merely using the English fleet
and ours to make the world understand that the time has come for
orderliness and peace and for the honest development of backward,
turbulent lands and peoples.

If you don't put this through, tell me what's the matter with it.
I've sent it to Washington after talking and being talked to for a
month and after the hardest kind of thinking. Isn't this
constructive? Isn't it using the great power lying idle about the
world, to do the thing that most needs to be done?

Colonel House presented this memorandum to the President, but events
sufficiently disclosed that it had no influence upon his Mexican policy.
Two days after it was written Mr. Wilson went before Congress, announced
that the Lind Mission had failed, and that conditions in Mexico had
grown worse. He advised all Americans to leave the country, and declared
that he would lay an embargo on the shipment of munitions--an embargo
that would affect both the Huerta forces and the revolutionary groups
that were fighting them.

Meanwhile Great Britain had taken another step that made as unpleasant
an impression on Washington as had the recognition of Huerta. Sir Lionel
Edward Gresley Carden had for several years been occupying British
diplomatic posts in