nature of legal disputes between neighbors whom a real emergency
would quickly bring to the assistance of each other. A crisis
involving interest, propinquity, and sentiment, was needed to
shake the nation into an activity which would clear its views.

At the very time of the Venezuela difficulty, such a crisis was
taking shape in the Caribbean. Cuba had always been an object of
immediate concern to the United States. The statesmen of the
Jeffersonian period all looked to its eventually becoming part of
American territory. Three quarters of a century before, when the
revolt of the Spanish colonies had halted on the shores of the
mainland, leaving the rich island of Cuba untouched, John Quincy
Adams, on April 28, 1823, in a lengthy and long-considered
dispatch to Mr. Nelson, the American Minister to Spain, asserted
that the United States could not consent to the passing of Cuba
from the flag of Spain to that of any other European power, that
under existing conditions Cuba was considered safer in the hands
of Spain than in those of the revolutionaries, and that the
United States stood for the maintenance of the status quo, with
the expectation that Cuba would ultimately become American
territory.

By the late forties and the fifties, however, the times had
changed, and American policy had changed with them. It was
becoming more and more evident that, although no real revolution
had as yet broken out, the "Pearl of the Antilles" was bound to
Spain by compulsion rather than by love. In the United States
there was a general feeling that the time had at last come to
realize the vision of Jefferson and Adams and to annex Cuba. But
the complications of the slavery question prevented immediate