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
situati