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Page 29
Like most stages in a nation's progress, the Monroe doctrine, though
elicited by a particular political incident, was not an isolated step
unrelated to the past, but a development. It had its antecedents in
feelings which arose before our War of Independence, and which in
1778, though we were then in deadly need of the French alliance, found
expression in the stipulation that France should not attempt to regain
Canada. Even then, and also in 1783, the same jealousy did not extend
to the Floridas, which at the latter date were ceded by Great Britain
to Spain; and we expressly acquiesced in the conquest of the British
West India Islands by our allies. From that time to 1815 no
remonstrance was made against the transfer of territories in the West
Indies and Caribbean Sea from one belligerent to another--an
indifference which scarcely would be shown at the present time, even
though the position immediately involved were intrinsically of trivial
importance; for the question at stake would be one of principle, of
consequences, far reaching as Hampden's tribute of ship-money.
It is beyond the professional province of a naval officer to inquire
how far the Monroe doctrine itself would logically carry us, or how
far it may be developed, now or hereafter, by the recognition and
statement of further national interests, thereby formulating another
and wider view of the necessary range of our political influence. It
is sufficient to quote its enunciation as a fact, and to note that it
was the expression of a great national interest, not merely of a
popular sympathy with South American revolutionists; for, had it been
the latter, it would doubtless have proved as inoperative and
evanescent as declarations arising from such emotions commonly are.
From generation to generation we have been much stirred by the
sufferings of Greeks, or Bulgarians, or Armenians, at the hands of
Turkey; but, not being ourselves injuriously affected, our feelings
have not passed into acts, and for that very reason have been
ephemeral. No more than other nations are we exempt from the profound
truth enunciated by Washington--seared into his own consciousness by
the bitter futilities of the French alliance in 1778 and the following
years, and by the extravagant demands based upon it by the Directory
during his Presidential term--that it is absurd to expect governments
to act upon disinterested motives. It is not as an utterance of
passing concern, benevolent or selfish, but because it voiced an
enduring principle of necessary self-interest, that the Monroe
doctrine has retained its vitality, and has been made so easily to do
duty as the expression of intuitive national sensitiveness to
occurrences of various kinds in regions beyond the sea. At its
christening the principle was directed against an apprehended
intervention in American affairs, which depended not upon actual
European concern in the territory involved, but upon a purely
political arrangement between certain great powers, itself the result
of ideas at the time moribund. In its first application, therefore, it
was a confession that danger of European complications did exist,
under conditions far less provocative of real European interest than
those which now obtain and are continually growing. Its subsequent
applications have been many and various, and the incidents giving rise
to them have been increasingly important, culminating up to the
present in the growth of the United States to be a great Pacific
power, and in her probable dependence in the near future upon an
Isthmian canal for the freest and most copious intercourse between her
two ocean seaboards. In the elasticity and flexibleness with which the
dogma thus has accommodated itself to varying conditions, rather than
in the strict wording of the original statement, is to be seen the
essential characteristic of a living principle--the recognition,
namely, that not merely the interests of individual citizens, but the
interests of the United States as a nation, are bound up with regions
beyond the sea, not part of our own political domain, in which
therefore, under some imaginable circumstances, we may be forced to
take action.
It is important to recognize this, for it will help clear away the
error from a somewhat misleading statement frequently made,--that the
United States needs a navy for defence only, adding often,
explanatorily, for the defence of our own coasts. Now in a certain
sense we all want a navy for defence only. It is to be hoped that the
United States will never seek war except for the defence of her
rights, her obligations, or her necessary interests. In that sense our
policy may always be defensive only, although it may compel us at
times to steps justified rather by expediency--the choice of the
lesser evil--than by incontrovertible right. But if we have interests
beyond sea which a navy may have to protect, it plainly follows that
the navy has more to do, even in war, than to defend the coast; and it
must be added as a received military axiom that war, however defensive
in moral character, must be waged aggressively if it is to hope for
success.
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