They will not concede its desirability, because the American
habit is to proclaim doctrines and policies, without considering either
the implications, the machinery necessary to carry them out, or the
weight of the resulting responsibilities. But in estimating the
practicability of the policy proposed, the essential idea must be
disentangled from any possible methods of realizing it--such as the
suggested treaty between the United States, Great Britain, and Canada.
An agreement along those lines may never be either practicable or
prudent, but the validity of the essential idea remains unaffected by
the abandonment of a detail. That idea demands that effective and
far-sighted arrangements be made in order to forestall the inevitable
future objections on the part of European nations to an uncompromising
insistence on the Monroe Doctrine; and no such arrangement is possible,
except by virtue of Canadian and Mexican cooeperation as well as that of
some of the South American states. It remains for American statesmanship
and diplomacy to discover little by little what means are practicable
and how much can be accomplished under any particular set of conditions.
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