ntages or concessions which she
cannot base upon the substantial justice of her demands. But, while
this is true, the United States has had in the past abundant
experience of disputes, in which, though she believed herself right,
even to the point of having a just _casus belli_, the other party has
not seemed to share the same conviction. These difficulties, chiefly,
though not solely, territorial in character, have been the natural
bequest of the colonial condition through which this hemisphere passed
on its way to its present political status. Her own view of right,
even when conceded in the end, has not approved itself at first to the
other party to the dispute. Fortunately these differences have been
mainly with Great Britain, the great and beneficent colonizer, a state
between which and ourselves a sympathy, deeper than both parties have
been ready always to admit, has continued to exist, because founded
upon common fundamental ideas of law and justice. Of this the happy
termination of the Venezuelan question is the most recent but not the
only instance.

It is sometimes said that Great Britain is the most unpopular state in
Europe. If this be so,--and many of her own people seem to accept the
fact of her political isolation, though with more or less of
regret,--is there nothing significant to us in that our attitude
towards her in the Venezuelan matter has not commanded the sympathy of
Europe, but rather the reverse? Our claim to enter, as of right, into
a dispute not originally our own, and concerning us only as one of the
American group of nations, has been rejected in no doubtful tones by
organs of public opinion which have no fondness for Great Britain.
Whether any foreign government has taken the same attitude is not
known,--probably there has been no official protest against the
apparent admission of a principle which binds nobody but the parties
to it. Do we ourselves realize that, happy as the issue of our
intervention has been, it may entail upon us greater responsibilities,
more serious action, than we have assumed before? that it amounts in
fact--if one may use a military metaphor--to occupying an advanced
position, the logical result very likely of other steps in the past,
but which nevertheless implies necessarily such organization of
strength as will enable us to hold it?

Without making a picture to ourselves, without conjuring up
extravagant contingencies, it is not difficult to detect the existe