The Path of Empire, A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power | Page 8

particularly important for Americans to make a
distinction between the things which they have always wished to obtain
and the methods which they have from time to time used. To build a
policy today on the alleged isolation of the American continents would
be almost as absurd as to try to build a government on the belief in
Divine Right. The American continents are no longer separated from
the rest of the world by their national institutions, because the spirit of
these institutions has permeated much of Europe, Asia, and even Africa.
No boundaries, not even oceans, can today prohibit international
interference. But while the particular method followed in 1823 is no
longer appropriate, the ends which the United States set out to attain
have remained the same. Independence, absolute and complete,
including the absence of all entanglements which might draw the
country into other peoples' quarrels; the recognition of a similar
independence in all other peoples, which involves both keeping its own
hands off and also strongly disapproving of interference by one nation
with another--these have been the 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 their territories
touch for three thousand miles. During the nineteenth century the
coastwise shipping of the United States was often forced to seek the
shelter of the British West Indies. The fisherfolk of England and
America mingled on the Grand Bank of Newfoundland and on the
barren shores of that island and of Labrador, where they dried their fish.
Indians, criminals, and game crossed the Canadian boundary at will,
streams flowed across it, and the coast cities vied for the trade of the
interior, indifferent to the claims of national allegiance. One cannot but
believe that this intimacy has in the long run made for friendship and
peace; but it has also meant constant controversy, often pressed to the

verge of war by the pertinacious insistence of both nations on their full
rights as they saw them.
The fifteen years following Adams's encounter with Canning saw the
gradual accumulation of a number of such disputes, which made the
situation in 1840 exceptionally critical. Great Britain was angered at
the failure of the United States to grant her the right to police the seas
for the suppression of the slave trade, while the United States, with
memories of the vicious English practice of impressment before the
War of 1812, distrusted the motives of Great Britain in asking for this
right. Nearly every mile of the joint boundary in North America was in
dispute, owing to the vagueness of treaty descriptions or to the errors of
surveyors. Twelve thousand square miles and a costly American fort
were involved; arbitration had failed; rival camps of lumberjacks daily
imperiled peace; and both the Maine Legislature and the National
Congress had voted money for defense. In a New York jail Alexander
McLeod was awaiting trial in a state court for the murder of an
American on the steamer Caroline, which a party of Canadian militia
had cut out from the American shore near Buffalo and had sent to
destruction over Niagara Falls. The British Government, holding that
the Caroline was at the time illegally employed to assist Canadian
insurgents, and that the Canadian militia were under government orders
justifiable by international law, assumed the responsibility for
McLeod's act and his safety. Ten thousand Americans along the border,
members of "Hunters'