guard the sea and
the United States were to furnish the soldiers for any land fighting
which might come on their side of the Atlantic.

World politics had led the enemies of England to help her revolting
colonies, Napoleon's jealousy of Britain had endowed the new nation
with the vast Louisiana Territory, and European complications saved the
United States from the natural consequences of their disastrous war of
1812, which taught them that union was as necessary to preserve their
independence as it had been to win it. Canning's project in principle
appealed to the North Americans, but the study of it soon showed that
Great Britain was selfish in her suggestion. After a generation of
fighting, England found herself drained of soldiers and therefore she
diplomatically invited the cooeperation of her former colonies; but,
regardless of any formal arrangement, her navy could be relied on to
prevent those who had played her false from transporting large armies
across the ocean into the neighborhood of her otherwise defenseless
colonies. That was self-preservation.

President Monroe's advisers were willing that their country should run
some risk on its own account, but they had the traditional American
aversion to entangling alliances. So the Cabinet counseled that the
young nation alone should make itself the protector of the South
American republics, and drafted the declaration warning the world
that aggression against any of the New World democracies would be
resented as unfriendliness to the United States.

It was the firm attitude of President Monroe that compelled Spain to
forego the attempt to reconquer her former colonies, and therefore
Mexico and Central and South America owe their existence as republics
quite as much to the elder commonwealth as does Cuba.

The American attitude revealed in the Monroe Doctrine was especially
obnoxious to the Spaniards in the Philippines but their intemperate
denunciations of the policy of America for the Americans served only
to spread a knowledge of that doctrine among the people of that little
territory which remained to them to misgovern. Secretly there began
to be, among the stouter-hearted Filipinos, some who cherished a
corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the Philippines for the Filipinos.

Thoughts of separation from Spain by means of rebellion, by sale
and by the assistance of other nations, had been thus put into the
heads of the people. These were all changes coming fro