But remote and precarious as is the
establishment of any American international system, it is not for
American statesmen necessarily either an impracticable, an irrelevant,
or an unworthy object. Fail though we may in the will, the intelligence,
or the power to carry it out, the systematic effort to establish a
peaceable American system is just as plain and just as inevitable a
consequence of the democratic national principle, as is the effort to
make our domestic institutions contribute to the work of individual and
social amelioration.
III
DEMOCRACY AND PEACE
A genuinely national foreign policy for the American democracy is not
exhausted by the Monroe Doctrine. The United States already has certain
colonial interests; and these interests may hereafter be extended. I do
not propose at the present stage of this discussion to raise the
question as to the legitimacy in principle of a colonial policy on the
part of a democratic nation. The validity of colonial expansion even for
a democracy is a manifest deduction from the foregoing political
principles, always assuming that the people whose independence is
thereby diminished are incapable of efficient national organization.
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