and it will survive its own utility because it flatters
American democratic vanity. But if such an idea should prevent the
American nation from contributing its influence to the establishment of
a peaceful system in Europe, America, and Asia, such a refusal would be
a decisive stop toward American democratic degeneracy. It would either
mean that the American nation preferred its apparently safe and easy
isolation to the dangers and complications which would inevitably attend
the final establishment of a just system of public law; or else it would
mean that the American people believed more in Americanism than they did
in democracy. A decent guarantee of international peace would be
precisely the political condition which would enable the European
nations to release the springs of democracy; and the Americanism which
was indifferent or suspicious of the spread of democracy in Europe would
incur and deserve the enmity of the European peoples. Such an attitude
would constitute a species of continental provincialism and chauvinism.
Hence there is no shibboleth that patriotic Americans should fight more
tenaciously and more fiercely than of America for the Americans, and
Europe for the Europeans. To make Pan-Americanism merely a matter of
geography is to deprive it of all serious meaning. Pan-Slavism or
Pan-Germanism, based upon a racial bond, would be a far more significant
political idea. The only possible foundation of Pan-Americanism is an
ideal democratic purpose--which, when translated into terms of
international relations, demands, in the first place, the establishment
of a pacific system of public law in the two Americas, and in the second
place, an alliance with the pacific European Powers, just in so far as a
similar system has become in that continent one of the possibilities of
practical politics.

CHAPTER XI

PROBLEMS OF RECONSTRUCTION

I

STATE INSTITUTIONAL REFORM

In the foregoing chapter I have traced the larger aspects of a
constructive relation between the national and democratic principles in
the field of foreign politics. The task remains of depicting somewhat in
detail the aspect which our more important domestic problems assume from
the point of view of the same relationship. The general outlines of this
picture have already been roughly sketched; but the mere sketch of a
fruitful general policy is not enough. A national policy must be
justified by the flexibility with which, without any