While this evolution is today far from a successful culmination, the United States has succeeded in maintaining effectively its political guardianship over democratic efforts in the sister American republics. Both Europe and Asia have cast envious eyes toward Central and South America. Even a war between Great Britain and the United States over boundary lines between Venezuela and British Guiana seemed imminent, after Great Britain had refused to submit the question to arbitration; but President Cleveland in clear, staunch defense of the Monroe Doctrine intimated his readiness to employ military force, and thereby sent a profound tremor of respect for the Monroe Doctrine throughout England, which caused her to reverse her decision and to decide to submit to arbitration. As a result, the Monroe Doctrine acquired a more real meaning than it had ever before possessed. Our defense of American democracies was thereby changed from a threat to action.

Through manipulation and intrigue in Mexico, Germany almost succeeded in 1917 in alienating that republic from pan-American loyalty. Through perfidy and secret machinations in the United States, Germany likewise was nearly successful in confounding democracy in our own republic. Fortunately, democracy in the United States has righted itself; and in the republics to our south, it has taken on new life because of the Monroe Doctrine, of Cleveland's brave support of that doctrine, and of the entry of the United States into the world war for democracy. The extension of the principle of democracy bids fair to continue, undisturbed by

European intervention, in the twenty-two American republics.

The days of Monroe were followed by increased suffering, due to the disturbing thorn of slavery in the side of democracy. The situation became acute under the piercing and prodding examinations of the abolitionists-William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown. These persons uttered a message which in composite form constituted virtually a second Declaration of Independence.

When the first Declaration was drafted, the white race alone had been included. The black race was then considered as representing a distinctly lower type. The idea did not occur that the Negro might be potentially on the same plane as the Caucasian and eligible to the same rights. Time, however, brought forth new conceptions. The black man was seen to be as human as the white man. The inconsistency of slavery in the land of democracy smote many exponents of democracy to silence and raised the voices of her most fearless champions in persistent protest.

The Kansas-Nebraska bill, the Dred Scot decision, the historic house-divided-against-itself speech of Lincoln at Springfield brought the main issue clearly before the nation. It was Lincoln who proclaimed that our democracy could not "endure permanently half slave and half free." The division over slavery finally rent the nation; but even at the darkest hours of the contest, Lincoln audaciously

announced that all persons held as slaves in the rebellious South were "then henceforth and forever free"; that their freedom would be recognized and maintained by the government and enforced by the army and navy; and that this act of emancipation was warranted by the Constitution-a new interpretation of the Constitution involving an extension of the concept of democracy.

Then came the memorable Gettysburg Speech, enshrining the Union dead in the flag of a new freedom which included Negro as well as Caucasian, re-defining a Union whose power to hold itself together was never again to be questioned, and basing democracy upon a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people." Thus, Lincoln not only created a new freedom and saved the Union, but gave the country a higher ideal of democracy.

In the decades following the close of the Civil War, the Westward Movement culminated. Days of material advancement and national prosperity came, halted briefly by the panic of 1873. Industrial and business organizations multiplied rapidly and grew in power and affluence. The effect upon democracy was tremendous and portentous. No less an American than Ralph Waldo Emerson in an address on "The Fortune of the Republic" in 1878, said:

"In this country with our practical understanding, there is, at present, a great sensualism, a headlong devotion to trade and to the conquest of the continent, to each man as large a share of the same as he can carve for himself,—an extravagant con

fidence in our talent and activity, which becomes, whilst successful, a scornful materialism. . . . . The American marches with a careless swagger to the height of power, very heedless of his own liberty or of other peoples', in his reckless confidence that he can have all he wants, risking all the prized charters of the human race, bought with battles and revolutions and religion,-gambling them all away for a paltry, selfish gain."

By 1890, however, a new democratic conscience was beginning to develop. It was a conscience that opposed the evils of the new material prosperity and power; it manifested itself frequently in hate and attack. Muck-raking flourished—the predecessor of the social survey of today. Individuals, without a sense of solidarity, of brotherhood, and of social responsibility, but stirred by the joint declarations of muck-rakers, expressed themselves in angry opposition to the Beef Trust, the Oil Trust, the Steel Trust. The Prohibition movement, which was in the Carrie Nation stage, was typical of much of the social procedure of the times. Many leading Americans still manifested the characteristics of Buffalo Bill.

The apex of the emphasis upon materialistic power was reached in the closing years of the nineteenth century. At that time, also, came the climax of the imperialistic tendencies of the nation. The war with Spain caused American patriotism to become inflated, egotistic, spectacular, imperialistic. Many individuals still proclaimed the ideal, "My country, right or wrong." Representative Amer

icans dreamed of the future United States as a vast world empire. Many persons believed that it was the manifest destiny of their country to release one small nation or group of peoples after another from political bondage and to add them to the possessions of the United States.

Materialism and imperialism were the most insidious foes of American democracy at the dawn of the twentieth century. In speaking of these dangers, Royal Dixon said that "the threatened dawn of plutocracy, the threatened wreck of the entire morale of the republic in graft, dishonesty, and money tyranny, led us to discover one sin after another until we were disgusted with ourselves as a nation."'s In this same connection, Elihu Root raised the question: "Have selfish living and factional quarreling obscured the spiritual vision of our country?" Mr. Dixon's comment upon this phase of American life is worthy of attention: "Let us concede the distinction that lies in speed, size, show, invention, adaptability, and ready cash; but let us admit that we have not kept these things in their place; that we have been prone to worship them, to place them above family honor, national honor, above church, creed, art, letters, music."

The United States has passed safely through the perils of materialistic machinations and the dangers of imperialistic desires. After becoming president in 1901 Theodore Roosevelt defied the entrenched giants of political and economic power, inaugurated

'Americanization, pp. 32, 133. *Ibid., p. 184.