as well as that of
some of the South American states. It remains for American statesmanship
and diplomacy to discover little by little what means are practicable
and how much can be accomplished under any particular set of conditions.
A candid man must admit that the obstacles may prove to be insuperable.
One of any number of possible contingencies may serve to postpone its
realization indefinitely. Possibly neither Canada nor Great Britain will
consent to any accommodation with the United States. Possibly one or
more South American states will assume an aggressive attitude towards
their neighbors. Possibly their passions, prejudices, and suspicions
will make them prefer the hazards and the costs of military preparations
and absolute technical independence, even though their interests counsel
another course. Possibly the consequences of some general war in Europe
or Asia will react on the two Americas and embroil the international
situation to the point of hopeless misunderstanding and confusion.
Indeed, the probabilities are that in America as in Europe the road to
any permanent international settlement will be piled mountain high with
dead bodies, and will be traveled, if at all, only after a series of
abortive and costly experiments. But remote and precarious as is the
establishment of any American international system, it is not for
American statesmen necessarily either an impracticable, an irrelevant,
or an unworthy object. Fail though we may in the will, the intelligence,
or the power to carry it out, the systematic effort to establish a
peaceable American system is just as plain and just as inevitable a
consequence of the democratic national principle, as is the effort to
make our domestic institutions contribute to the work of individual and
social amelioration.

III

DEMOCRACY AND PEACE

A genuinely national foreign policy for the American democracy is not
exhausted by the Monroe Doctrine. The United States already has certain
colonial interests; and these interests may hereafter be extended. I do
not propose at the present stage of this discussion to raise the
question as to the legitimacy in principle of a colonial policy on the
part of a democratic nation. The validity of colonial expansion even for
a democracy is a manifest deduction from the foregoing political
principles, always assuming that the people whose independence is
thereby diminished are incapable of efficient national organization. On
th