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,