THE MONROE DOCTRINE 305 



Americas. As already noted, the idea had been more or less 

 steadily evolving for a number of years, and had found 

 occasional expression as one circumstance or another had 

 inspired it in the writings and speeches of Jefferson, Madi- 

 son, Adams, and Clay, and members of Congress. At last 

 the nation had arrived at the point when its own sense of 

 power, that gratifying feeling of self-confidence, gave the 

 assurance of weight to any foreign policy it might choose to 

 adopt, and especially in reference to such matters as related 

 purely to the advancement of Western-world interests. With 

 one exception the newly created states of Central and South 

 America, established republican forms of government, and it 

 seemed more than ever to be true that the political world 

 was dividing itself into two camps, the one in Europe fol- 

 lowing the older conservative ideas of government, and the 

 other in the Western Hemisphere embracing the more pro- 

 gressive ideas of republicanism. 



The President and his cabinet were fully aware of the 

 natural antagonism between these diametrically opposing 

 political systems. Already from an alliance of powerful mon- 

 archs, murmurings of hostility to popular government had 

 come from abroad. No direct conflict was in prospect, but it 

 was well to prepare for it. In his annual message of Decem- 

 ber 3, 1822, President Monroe went to work upon that struc- 

 ture whose foundations had already been laid and cemented, 

 and which, in the following year, he completed in all its 

 towering proportions. 



Whether we reason from the late wars [in Europe] or from those 

 menacing symptoms which now appear in Europe, it is manifest 

 that if a convulsion should take place in any of those countries it 

 will proceed from causes which have no existence and are utterly 

 unknown in these states, in which there is but one order, that of 

 the people, to whom the sovereignty exclusively belongs. Should 

 war break out in any of those countries, who can foretell the 

 extent to which it may be carried or the desolation which it may 

 spread ? Exempt as we are from these causes, our internal tran- 

 quillity is secure ; and distant as we are from the troubled scene, 

 and faithful to first principles in regard to other powers, we 

 might reasonably presume that we should not be molested by 



