prepared to play its part as a world power. On the other hand, the movement for disarmament, supported by those who believed that judicial settlement might be substituted for war, received new impulse from the horrors of modern warfare. Many of the leaders of this movement were as dissatisfied with the government as were those favoring greater armaments. They wished the President to take the lead in bringing about peace by offering mediation. The great majority of the people, however, accepted the lead of the administration. Although extreme utterances on every side of every question attested the existence of free speech, the press and conversation alike reflected a very general following of President Wilson's advice that the spirit as well as the letter of neutrality be kept, and as yet (April, 1915) the war has not become in any way a party question.

CHAPTER XXXVI

SUCCESS AND ITS CAUSES

OUR diplomacy has, on the whole, served the national needs and purposes exceptionally well. No other nation has been confronted so continually by the problem of neutrality, and for none has it assumed such protean shapes; yet it is impossible to see how we could, with foreknowledge, have improved our handling of it in any large way. For no other nation has the problem of protecting its citizens abroad been so difficult, owing to the great numbers of our naturalized citizens and the variety of their origin; but at the present day, and for a long time past, an American passport is nowhere inferior to any other certificate of nationality. Although our merchant flag was ill-treated during the wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period, we won for it later, in the teeth of Great Britain, a freedom almost unique.

The policies for the building up of our merchant marine and the furtherance of our commerce have been chiefly determined by internal considerations, but diplomacy has in all cases eventually, though with difficulty, laid open the path for the execution of those policies internationally. The government has been able to offer our people as great opportunities for the exercise of their activities beyond the national boundaries as any other nation has enjoyed; our Newfoundland fisheries, for example, have been even more caressingly watched over than have those of France. It has also successfully protected them in the enjoyment of their national resources, the only important exception being the practical destruction of the seal herd of Behring sea. The territory desired by our people for their expansion has

been obtained, excepting to the north. There, meeting the equal force of Great Britain, we are left with a straight line as the result of the impact. The study of the measuring of each stretch of that line, however, reveals the fact that we obtained all that we had the power to demand.

Erratic and experimental divergencies in our diplomacy have been few. Of these, Jefferson's embargo must be considered the greatest, and it was diplomatically unsuccessful and disastrous. To err with Napoleon, however, does not indicate lightness of mind; and the embargo in the United States, like the continental system in Europe, hastened an internal development that was sure to come. Our many and varied attempts at an unnatural expansion failed because they were unnatural, and left no serious effects. Our foreign wars have all been turned to account-even that of 1812, which was saved from being a national calamity only by the skill of our diplomats at Ghent.

This success has rested upon a continuity, both of detail and of general policy, which is remarkable in a nation that in a hundred and fifty years has gone through all the stages of evolution from a second-rate colony to a great power. This continuity must in a considerable degree be attributed to that juristic tone which until very recently has been a predominating factor in our public life. Well advised in the beginning, particularly by Franklin, we accepted a system of international law which appealed to our ethical sense and fitted our position and interests. To this we clung with an unequaled persistence and exactitude, and it is in large part through our efforts that this system has become the basis of the accepted international law of to-day.

That in handling innumerable petty cases and frequent pressing crises we were able to preserve an impressive consistency of practice, was not primarily due to the efforts of our diplomatic staff in foreign countries. Efficient as it was at some periods, and brilliant as have been some of the men composing it at every stage, it had after 1829 no element of

cohesion, unless between 1897 and 1913, and it has at all times been marred by the presence of incompetent or unsuitable individuals. The home administration of diplomacy, however, has exhibited a continuity of service and a conspicuous ability which give it rank with our supreme court. John Jay, John Quincy Adams, William Hunter, and John Bassett Moore cover the whole period of our diplomacy, and represent an almost constant service within the state department or easy availability for advice to it. Other series equally striking may be named. Jefferson and Buchanan were always powerful, and for much of the time in control, from the beginning of independence to Civil war; Seward and Hay, from 1849 to 1905. William Hunter and A. A. Adee together served in the state department from 1829 to the present day (1915); counting the years when they overlapped, their combined service falls just six years short of a century. Such personal oversight has meant a growth from precedent to precedent which has gradually resulted in a self-carrying tradition for those minor matters that do not reach the public ear.1

The consistency with which general policies have been applied in the greater episodes, as such have arisen, is due to the force of a governing public opinion. It is probably true that the growth of democracy has made diplomacy more difficult in most countries than it previously had been. "That the reverse has been true in the United States has been due, in the first place, to the juristic habit of mind already mentioned. The Monroe Doctrine has been popularly regarded as a law; its successive extensions have been looked upon in the same light as the new powers which the courts haye successively found by implication in the constitution. More important has been the simplicity of our leading and essential policy. The harmonizing of conflicting ideas, when they have presented themselves, has proved beyond our grasp. The one deliberate purpose which our diplomacy has

1 Gaillard Hunt, Department of State of the United States, N. H., 1914.

completely failed to bring about has been that of winning the sympathy and acquiring the leadership of Spanish America. The reason is obvious; not the sentiment of Pan-Americanism, but the deep-seated nationalistic conception of United States dominance, has primarily moved us. From the day in 1794 when Wayne rode round the British fort at the rapids of the Maumee and dared its commander to fire, we have, with the exception of brief periods after the first abdication of Napoleon and during the Civil war, been the dominant American power. In 1823 we announced the fact to the world, and at the same time first became generally conscious of it ourselves. Every corollary added to the Monroe Doctrine has been a renewed assertion of the fact, and has presented an added means of maintaining it.

Dominance is not a policy but a talent: the responsibility is for its use. Our employment of our position has rested upon a feeling that long antedated it, that even antedated our ancestors' migration to America. They wanted to be let alone, the colonies in 1776 wanted to be let alone, to seek their future in their own way. In return they were willing, not exactly to let every one else alone, but at least to confine their activities to the limits within which they were actually in control. Franklin rejected the idea of colonial representation in the English Parliament; he wished not legislative participation in the empire, but legislative independence within the colonial area. This was the reverse side of the Monroe Doctrine. In America we were dominant; by confining our activities to America we could be dominant wherever we were active. It is this simple and fundamental idea that has impressed itself on the American mind, and has become the touchstone by which public opinion judges all diplomatic questions. With such a task as keeping adjusted a balance of power, democracy is probably incompetent to deal, with its accustomed practicality the democracy of America has determined that it will have no balance of power in America, and will not meddle with it where it exists.