a. None of these
possessions, however, is of considerable economic or political
importance. There remain Bolivia, Uruguay, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay,
Peru, Venezuela, and the Central American states. The most populous of
these countries is Peru (5,800,000 persons). All of the Central American
states combined have a population of less than 6,000,000. The annual
revenues of Uruguay (population 1,407,000) are $30,453,000 (1918-19).
The combined government revenues of all Central America are less than
twenty-five millions. (_Statistical Abstract of the U. S._, 1919, p.
826ff.)

Compared with the hundred million population of the United States; its
estimated wealth (1918) of 250 billions; and its federal revenues of a
billion and a half in 1916, the Latin American republics cut a very
small figure indeed. The United States, bristling with economic surplus
and armed with the Monroe Doctrine, as accepted and interpreted in the
League Covenant, is free to turn her attention to the rich opportunities
offered by the undeveloped territory stretching from the Rio Grande to
Cape Horn. What is there to hinder her movements in this direction?
Nothing but the limitation on her own needs and the adherence to her own
public policies. This vast area, containing approximately nine million
square miles (three times the area of continental United States), has a
population of only a little over seventy millions. The entire government
revenues of the territory are in the neighborhood of six hundred
million, but so widely scattered are the people, so sharp are their
nationalistic differences, and so completely have they failed to build
up anything like an effective league to protect their common interests,
that skillful maneuvering on the part of American economic and political
interests should meet with no effectual or thoroughgoing opposition.

The "hands off America" doctrine which the United States has enunciated,
and which Europe has accepted, means first that none of the Latin
American Republics is permitted to enter into any entangling alliances
without the approval of the United States. In the second place it means
that the United States is free to treat all Latin American countries in
the same way that she has treated Cuba, Hayti and Nicaragua during the
past twenty years.

3. _Economic "Latin America"_

The United States is the chief producer--in the Western Hemisphere--of
the manufactured supplies needed by the relatively und