n said:
"Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable where the peace of the
world is involved and the freedom of its peoples, and the menace to
that peace and freedom lies in the existence of autocratic Governments
backed by organized force which is controlled wholly by their will, not
by the will of their people. We have seen the last of neutrality in
such circumstances." Having once abandoned neutrality and isolation we
are not likely to remain neutral again in any war which involves the
balance of power in the world or the destinies of the major portion of
mankind. Neutrality and isolation were correlative. They were both
based on the view that we were a remote and distant people and had no
intimate concern with what was going on in the great world across the
seas.

The failure of neutrality and the abandonment of isolation marked a
radical, though inevitable, change in our attitude toward world
politics. President Wilson did not propose, however, to abandon the
great principles for which we as a nation had stood, but rather to
extend them and give them a world-wide application. In his address to
the Senate on January 22, 1917, he said:

"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 extend its polity over any other nation
or people, but that every people should be left free to determine its
own polity, its own way of development, unhindered, unthreatened,
unafraid, the little along with the great and powerful.

"I am proposing that all 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 their own affairs with
influences intruded from without. There is no entangling alliance in a
concert of power."

In other words, the Monroe Doctrine, stripped of its imperialistic
tendencies, was to be internationalized, and the American policy of
isolation, in the sense of avoiding secret alliances, was to become a
fundamental principle of the new international order. If the United
States was to go into a league of nations, every member of the league
must stand on its own footing. We were not to be made a buffer between
alliances and ententes.

X

THE WAR AIMS OF THE UNITED STATES

The advent of the United States into the family of nations nearly a
century and a half ago was an e