guiding principles of the United States. These principles the
Government has maintained by such means as seemed appropriate to
the time. In colonial days the people of America fought in
courts for their charter rights; at the time of the Revolution,
by arms for their independence from England; during the
Napoleonic wars, for their independence from the whole system of
Europe. The Monroe Doctrine declared that to maintain American
independence from the European system it was necessary that the
European system be excluded from the Americas. In entering the
Great War in the twentieth century the United States has
recognized that the system of autocracy against which Monroe
fulminated must disappear from the entire world if, under modern
industrial conditions, real independence is to exist anywhere.

It is the purpose of the following chapters to trace the
expansion of American interests in the light of the Monroe
Doctrine and to explain those controversies which accompanied
this growth and taxed the diplomatic resources of American
Secretaries of State from the times of Adams and Webster and
Seward to those of Blaine and Hay and Elihu Root. The diplomacy
of the Great War is reserved for another volume in this Series.



CHAPTER II. Controversies With Great Britain

No two nations have ever had more intimate relationships than the
United States and Great Britain. Speaking the same language and
owning a common racial origin in large part, they have traded
with each other and in the same regions, and geographically