will reach. As long as any one of them cherishes
objects which can only be realized by war, the international situation
in the Western hemisphere will remain similar to that of Europe. An
actual or latent aggressiveness on the part of any one nation inevitably
provokes its neighbors into a defiant and suspicious temper. It is too
soon to predict whether the economic and political development of the
Latin-Americans during the next generation will make for a warlike or a
peaceful international organization; but considering the political
geography of South America and the manifest economic interests of the
several states, it does not look as if any one of them had as much to
gain from a militant organization as it had from a condition of
comparative international security.

The domestic condition of some of the Latin-American states presents a
serious obstacle to the creation of a stable American international
system. Such a system presupposes a condition of domestic peace. The
several contracting states must possess permanent and genuinely national
political organizations; and no such organization is possible as long as
the tradition and habit of revolution persists. As we have seen, the
political habits of the more important states have in this respect
enormously improved of late years, but there remain a number of minor
countries wherein the right of revolution is cherished as the essential
principle of their democracy. Just what can be done with such states is
a knotty problem. In all probability no American international system
will ever be established without the forcible pacification of one or
more such centers of disorder. Coercion should, of course, be used only
in the case of extreme necessity; and it would not be just to deprive
the people of such states of the right of revolution, unless effective
measures were at the same time taken to do away with the more or less
legitimate excuses for revolutionary protest. In short, any
international American political system might have to undertake a task
in states like Venezuela, similar to that which the United States is now
performing in Cuba. That any attempt to secure domestic stability would
be disinterested, if not successful, would be guaranteed by the
participation or the express acquiescence therein of the several
contracting states.

The United States has already made an effective beginning in this great
work, both by the pacification of Cuba and by the attem