of
Turkey; but, not being ourselves injuriously affected, our feelings
have not passed into acts, and for that very reason have been
ephemeral. No more than other nations are we exempt from the profound
truth enunciated by Washington--seared into his own consciousness by
the bitter futilities of the French alliance in 1778 and the following
years, and by the extravagant demands based upon it by the Directory
during his Presidential term--that it is absurd to expect governments
to act upon disinterested motives. It is not as an utterance of
passing concern, benevolent or selfish, but because it voiced an
enduring principle of necessary self-interest, that the Monroe
doctrine has retained its vitality, and has been made so easily to do
duty as the expression of intuitive national sensitiveness to
occurrences of various kinds in regions beyond the sea. At its
christening the principle was directed against an apprehended
intervention in American affairs, which depended not upon actual
European concern in the territory involved, but upon a purely
political arrangement between certain great powers, itself the result
of ideas at the time moribund. In its first application, therefore, it
was a confession that danger of European complications did exist,
under conditions far less provocative of real European interest than
those which now obtain and are continually growing. Its subsequent
applications have been many and various, and the incidents giving rise
to them have been increasingly important, culminating up to the
present in the growth of the United States to be a great Pacific
power, and in her probable dependence in the near future upon an
Isthmian canal for the freest and most copious intercourse between her
two ocean seaboards. In the elasticity and flexibleness with which the
dogma thus has accommodated itself to varying conditions, rather than
in the strict wording of the original statement, is to be seen the
essential characteristic of a living principle--the recognition,
namely, that not merely the interests of individual citizens, but the
interests of the United States as a nation, are bound up with regions
beyond the sea, not part of our own political domain, in which
therefore, under some imaginable circumstances, we may be forced to
take action.

It is important to recognize this, for it will help clear away the
error from a somewhat misleading statement frequently made,--that the
United States needs a navy fo