our own and already marked by the
United States for eventual annexation and incorporation. Cuba, on the
contrary, was entirely detached from our domain, and while there were
then those who anticipated and desired her ultimate annexation, there
was no such confident and determined resolution to that effect that
there was in the case of the other regions named. Cuba was therefore the
first detached country, not destined for annexation, to which the United
States extended and applied the fundamental principle which was later
developed into the Monroe Doctrine. We may not doubt that the Monroe
Doctrine would have been put forward, even had it not been for Cuba. We
may not deny nor dispute that it was because of Cuba and concerning Cuba
that the first specific and indubitable intimation of that doctrine was
given.

The development of American policy toward Cuba is an important and
interesting part of the history of the United States as well as of Cuba.
The progressively significant utterances of the younger Adams, of Clay
and of Forsythe, culminating years afterward in those of Cleveland and
McKinley, form one of the most consistent, logical and convincing
chapters in American diplomatic history. It is marred, we must confess,
by some adventitious excrescences, chiefly contributed by Calhoun and
Pierre Soule. Yet even these, deplorable as they ever must be regarded,
fail to destroy the symmetry of the whole. It is a chapter, indeed,
which more than any other is comprehensive and expository of the whole
spirit and trend of American international transactions.

Cuba has also been intimately connected with three great issues of
American domestic politics, as well as with that supreme principle of
her foreign policy. The first of these was that of human slavery. From
the end of the second war with Great Britain to the beginning of the
Civil War that issue dominated American politics and therefore
determined largely the American attitude toward Cuba. The pro-slavery
influences, which were generally paramount at Washington, resisted all
efforts, which otherwise might have been successful, to draw Cuba into
the community of republics freed from Spanish rule in Central and South
America, because of unwillingness to have her become, like them, free
soil; and subsequently the same influences planned and plotted and
fought for Cuban annexation to the United States, either by conquest or
by purchase, in order that she might thus be add