Such an attitude
would constitute a species of continental provincialism and chauvinism.
Hence there is no shibboleth that patriotic Americans should fight more
tenaciously and more fiercely than of America for the Americans, and
Europe for the Europeans. To make Pan-Americanism merely a matter of
geography is to deprive it of all serious meaning. Pan-Slavism or
Pan-Germanism, based upon a racial bond, would be a far more significant
political idea. The only possible foundation of Pan-Americanism is an
ideal democratic purpose--which, when translated into terms of
international relations, demands, in the first place, the establishment
of a pacific system of public law in the two Americas, and in the second
place, an alliance with the pacific European Powers, just in so far as a
similar system has become in that continent one of the possibilities of
practical politics.
CHAPTER XI
PROBLEMS OF RECONSTRUCTION
I
STATE INSTITUTIONAL REFORM
In the foregoing chapter I have traced the larger aspects of a
constructive relation between the national and democratic principles in
the field of foreign politics.
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