ew people in the United States and perhaps fewer in the countries
involved realize from what American influence has saved these small
states. A glance at Africa and Asia will suggest what would otherwise
have been the case. Without the United States and its leadership,
there can be little doubt that giant semi-sovereign corporations owing
allegiance to some great power would now possess these countries. They
would bristle with forts and police, and their populations would be in a
state of absolute political and of quasi-economic servitude. They might
today be more orderly and perhaps wealthier, but unless the fundamental
American belief in democracy and self-government is wrong they would be
infinitely farther from their true goal, which involves the working out
of their own civilization.

The Caribbean is but a portion of the whole international problem of
the Americas, and the methods used by the United States in solving its
problems seemed likely to postpone that sympathetic union of the whole
to which it has been looking forward for a century. Yet this country
has not been unappreciative of the larger aspects of Pan-Americanism.
In 1899 President McKinley revived Blaine's project and proposed
a Pan-American congress. To popularize this idea, a Pan-American
Exposition was arranged at Buffalo in 1901. Here, just after he had
expounded his views of the ties that might bind the continents together,
McKinley was assassinated. The idea, however, lived and in the same year
a congress was held at the City of Mexico, where it was proposed that
such meetings be held regularly. As a result, congresses were held at
Rio de Janeiro in 1906 and at Buenos Aires in 1910, at which various
measures of common utility were discussed and a number of projects were
actually undertaken.

The movement of Pan-Americanism has missed achieving the full hopes of
its supporters owing not so much to a difference of fundamental ideas
and interests as to suspicion and national pride. The chief powers of
southern South America--Argentina, Brazil, and Chili--had by the end of
the nineteenth century in large measure successfully worked out their
own problems. They resented the interference of a power of alien race
such as the United States, and they suspected its good intentions in
wielding the "Big Stick," especially after the cavalier treatment which
Colombia had received. They observed with alarm the strengthening of the
grip of the United States a