and there should spring up there
the corresponding new industries and habits of consumption, to the
ultimate benefit of all the countries concerned.

Meanwhile, the United States is the only present economic hope of a
number of the republics. It is to be hoped that our capitalists and
business men will realize the responsibilities as well as the
opportunities of profit in the role they are asked to play, and that
their response to their new opportunities will be one of courage,
thoroughness and intelligence, and one also of quiet patriotism.

II.

POLITICAL POTENTIALITIES.

Turning from the opportunity to the lesson, from the commercial and
economic aspects of this question to those that are political in the
large sense, one's imagination is appalled at the potentialities of the
yet unknown results of so vast an upheaval. Yet we must envisage some of
these if we are to be prepared for their effect upon us. We must be
ready for the impact of the resultant forces of these great dynamics. We
must be ready everywhere, but nowhere more than in our relations with
Latin America, in the zone of the Caribbean, and wherever the Monroe
Doctrine as still interpreted gives us a varying degree of
responsibility.

The war's first effect upon our Latin-American relations is to compel
through commercial and financial rapprochement a larger measure of
material interdependence, more contact, and, we may hope, a substitution
of knowledge for the former reciprocity of ignorance. All this makes for
better social and intellectual relations, good understanding and
friendship, and so for political relations much more substantial in the
case of many of the republics than the rather flimsy Pan-Americanism
celebrated in eloquent speeches and futile international conferences.

There is little in Pan-Americanism of that kind. The "raza Latina" of
eloquence is not itself homogeneous; still less so is the population of
the whole hemisphere. And with Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and
Santiago we have, of course, far less propinquity than we have with the
capitals of Europe. But what we really can do is to build up, especially
with the nearer republics, real ties of common interest and good
neighborhood, and with the distant ones ties of commerce and esteem.

The war may tend to cure certain rather self-centred countries of
affecting the morbid view that the people of the United States are lying
awake nights contriving to devour them, when, i