nada. Canada, on her part, would enter into an alliance with the
United States, looking towards the preservation of peace on the American
continents and the establishment of an American international political
system. Canada and the United States in their turn would agree to lend
the support of their naval forces to Great Britain in the event of a
general European war, but solely for the purpose of protecting the
cargoes of grain and other food which might be needed by Great Britain.
Surely the advantages of such an arrangement would be substantial and
well-distributed. Canada would feel secure in her independence, and
would be emancipated from irrelevant European complications. The United
States would gain support, which is absolutely essential for the proper
pacification of the American continent, and would pay for that support
only by an engagement consonant with her interest as a food-exporting
power. Great Britain would exchange a costly responsibility for an
assurance of food in the one event, which Britons must fear--viz., a
general European war with strong maritime powers on the other side. Such
an arrangement would, of course, be out of the question at present; but
it suggests the kind of treaty which might lead Great Britain to consent
to the national emancipation of Canada, and which could be effected
without endangering Canadian independence.

Any systematic development of the foreign policy of the United States,
such as proposed herewith, will seem very wild to the majority of
Americans. They will not concede its desirability, because the American
habit is to proclaim doctrines and policies, without considering either
the implications, the machinery necessary to carry them out, or the
weight of the resulting responsibilities. But in estimating the
practicability of the policy proposed, the essential idea must be
disentangled from any possible methods of realizing it--such as the
suggested treaty between the United States, Great Britain, and Canada.
An agreement along those lines may never be either practicable or
prudent, but the validity of the essential idea remains unaffected by
the abandonment of a detail. That idea demands that effective and
far-sighted arrangements be made in order to forestall the inevitable
future objections on the part of European nations to an uncompromising
insistence on the Monroe Doctrine; and no such arrangement is possible,
except by virtue of Canadian and Mexican cooeperation