by British and even by French cruisers on the high seas, in one case out of a duly commissioned American man-of-war. The Yankee shipmasters protested and at the same time went on making money by various innocent or fraudulent evasions of their neutral obligations. After eight years of fruitless diplomacy the country entered into the war of 1812 at the inopportune moment when Napoleon was penetrating Russia, there to be overwhelmed by the snows. The difficulty was that in the death grapple between England and France the rights and the wrongs, the friendship or the hostility, of America seemed a little thing. Jefferson discovered that great nations at war are not moved by ideals of permanent self-interest or by the plaints of a defenseless government.

Nevertheless, during the war of 1812, the Americans discovered that they possessed a talisman which could move even proud Albion: the victories of American cruisers in eleven out of thirteen ship duels, combined with the heroism of the privateers, convinced the English that after all David was a likely youth, whose sling might disturb the peace of the nations. Hence in the peace of Ghent, in 1814, terms highly favorable to the United States were secured.

From that time down to the Civil War, the United States had the respect of all European nations, and the advantage in most negotiations. It was a period when the hemispheres were educating each other. From America proceeded a current of popular government which, first revealed in the French Revolution, ran through western Europe. France, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, and, above all, England, felt the democratic spirit, accepted liberal constitutions or fundamental statutes, occasionally set up temporary republics, and in Switzerland revived and perpetuated the ancient republican spirit. On the other hand, the Americans by the right of descent took to themselves the splendid heritage of English literature; outside the works of their statesmen they had little else to read before the dawn of their own golden age of literature about 1830. Direct French influence declined after the eighteenth century, but the Germans, through their immigrants, through their influence on American educators, through their love for music, became a vital force in America. Every immigrating race brought some of its folk lore and traditions, and in the case of the Germans its national

beverages. Americans like Bayard Taylor visited Europe and wrote popular accounts of their experiences; while scores of Europeans published their American travels. The Atlantic, no longer a barrier between nations, was bringing the old world and the new into a common understanding.

Before the French wars were over began a movement which totally changed the relations of the United States to her neighbors: the revolt of the Latin-American colonies, beginning in 1806, renewed in 1814, and completed in 1825, removed from both the North and South American continents every foreign flag except that of Great Britain; and thus opened up a field of influence and of annexation in which the United States was paramount. The consciousness of a new responsibility was seen in the Monroe Doctrine of 1823; and the British, through the offer of Canning to make a joint declaration against the interference of the Holy Alliance, recognized the United States as the only other substantial American power. Within ten years thereafter Great Britain gave up her colonial system, then nearly two centuries old; met the United States half way in compromises on the boundaries of Maine and of Oregon; entered into a reciprocity treaty in 1854 for Canada; and in every way strove to undo the national sense of ill-usage from the mother country. Great Britain made no effort to prevent the expansion of the United States in Texas, New Mexico, and California; and when those annexations brought up the long-debated question of an Isthmus canal, by the Clayton-Bulwer treaty of 1850 again recognized the fact that the United States had at least an equal interest in a waterway across the narrow lands.

In territory, in prestige, in influence, in relations to the far distant canal, the United States occupied a bold and strong position in the eyes of the world; and American influence was felt at the Antipodes. In 1844, taking advantage of the lodgement of European powers in China, a commercial treaty was obtained with that power. In 1854 the United States, without the aid or license of any other nation, broke down the wall of seclusion which inclosed Japan, and opened up the commerce and the political life of that people to western influence. The country was eager to annex Cuba, and thus to acquire a foothold in the Caribbean Sea; and three or four times seemed on the point of accomplishing that purpose.

Perhaps this spirit of territorial expansion was at that time the dominant ideal of the country in foreign relations; and it would have been more successful but for what was really an accidental complication with the growth of slavery. A second ideal of the time was that of special interest in Latin-America, based upon the notion of two spheres of the world's diplomacy, an eastern and a western, each separate from the other. Another ideal was that of freedom of movement about the world: Americans expected to be admitted into any country which they thought they would like to see; the Yankee clipper ship carried the American flag into every sea; and Americans stood for the right of neutrals to carry on their commerce, even though inconvenient to one or the other of two belligerents. So far as they could, Americans carried the political ideals of free movement, of equality and self-government into international relations.

The Civil War disturbed international harmonies which had lasted for two generations, and upset the dearest American tenets of international law. The northern conception that the southern confederacy was a treasonable riot, not deserving the amenities of honorable warfare, did not fit with the usual principles of international law, nor with the practice of blockading southern ports and exchanging prisoners of war. To the mind of the federal government there was no such thing as neutrality in the Civil War, and duly commissioned cruisers, issuing from southern ports to prey upon northern commerce, were looked upon as nothing but pirates; while the recognition by Great Britain of the belligerency of the Southern Confederacy, nearly a month after that belligerency had practically been acknowledged by President Lincoln's blockade proclamation, was then, and for ten years after, considered a deliberate affront. When the British mail steamer Trent was seized on the high seas, President Lincoln was obliged to say that we seemed to be doing what had caused the war of 1812 when done by Great Britain. Privateering also, which from the dawn of colonization to the end of the war of 1812 had been the favorite pursuit of adventurous seamen, was now held up as a crime against humanity.

The reason for this outburst of public opinion was partly a feeling of rage at what seemed like the intention of foreign governments to favor the Confederacy. The most decisive battles in the first two years of the civil war were fought in the offices of the British and

French foreign ministers in London and Paris. When Earl Russell, under pressure from our minister, Charles Francis Adams, declared that he would not again receive the confederate envoys, the first redoubt was carried; when in 1862, Mr. Gladstone, a member of the government, publicly declared that "Mr. Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making a navy; and they have made a nation!" England and many thoughtful men in the United States thought the battle had gone against the union. Foreign relations meant something when the outcome of the Civil War depended on the question whether or not foreign nations would forego their cotton, admit the right of blockade, hold off their vessels of war, and leave the struggle to be fought out on the continent of North America.

Eventually the skill of Mr. Adams in England, combined with some timely victories, persuaded England, in whose wake followed France, that the Confederacy would probably fail. Unfortunately, in derogation of international law several confederate cruisers built in British ports were allowed to go to sea, and the most destructive of them, the Alabama, gave her name to a sentiment and a negotiation, which involved Great Britain and the United States in dangerous controversies. It was not the British nation, but the aristocratic government for the time being, which had hoped for confederate success; and in 1867 a reform in the suffrage liberalized the government. The new dispensation was shrewd enough to see the danger of leaving alive the resentment of the victorious north; hence in 1869 Great Britain agreed to a commission of arbitration to decide upon the American claims, under certain previously accepted rules, which made it certain that Great Britain would be adjudged in the wrong. This was a great concession for a proud people to make; but it probably averted war, and certainly led to the Geneva arbitration of 1872, which practically found a verdict against Great Britain, but limited the damage to fifteen and a half million dollars. While this controversy was pending the United States also adjusted a long standing account with Napoleon III., who had taken advan tage of the civil war to set up a despotism in Mexico. In 1867 he was compelled to withdraw his troops without arbitration and without indemnity.

In 1875, therefore, the United States found almost all the old grievances adjusted. The civil war made the world understand that there was enormous potential military strength in America; but that the people preferred peace, and had no objections to other nations making sacrifices to preserve it. The Americans had a new ideal of their position in the world, and felt that principles of international intercourse which were desirable for their comfort must perforce be international law. If they captured a vessel bound to Mexico on the ground that her cargo was bound to Texas, thenceforth other nations must accept that principle; if they intended that no other power should take Cuba away from Spain, that, too, was "crowner quest law." The most important residuum of the Civil War was, however, a great bitterness toward Great Britain, because the action of that power was supposed to have prolonged the war; it was nothing like the bitterness felt by the Confederates toward the same power, because they felt that the English had deserted them in their hour of need.

The United States was now indubitably a great power, but not a world power so long as most of her controversies and interests were within the two Americas. The rapid growth of general military service on the continent brought about difficulties with young men who emigrated to America and afterward returned home, and by an act of 1865 and a series of treaties, the United States admitted the principle that a naturalized American citizen might lose his citizenship through making a stay too long in his country of origin; and this meant, of course, that a man might in the course of his life be the acknowledged citizen of several different powers. In LatinAmerica the United States began to use her great influence to heal dissensions, or at least to compel the rival powers to come to terms. In 1881 the effort to hold back Chile from annexing Peru was a flat failure. In 1890 the national government was curiously seen espousing the cause of a desperate dictator against a popular congress in Chile. In 1895 the United States compelled Great Britain to arbitrate a boundary claim with Venezuela. In 1903 the same power was protected against a threatened military occupation by Germany. These acts, combined with remarkable dispatches by Secretary Olney, in 1895, on the Monroe Doctrine, showed that the United States