Page 171 - The interest of America in sea power, present and future

152 The Future in Relation to

contracted with that nation engagements not
less sacred, and not less binding upon his
Majesty's mind, than the most solemn treaties."
We may have to accept also certain corollaries
which may appear naturally to result from the
Monroe doctrine, but we are by no means com-
mitted to some propositions which lately have
been tallied with its name. Those propositions
possibly embody a sound policy, more applicable
to present conditions than the Monroe doctrine
itself, and therefore destined to succeed it ; but
they are not the same thing. There is, how-
ever, something in common between it and
them. Reduced to its barest statement, and
stripped of all deductions, natural or forced, the
Monroe doctrine, if it were not a mere political
abstraction, formulated an idea to which in the
last resort effect could be given only through
the instrumentality of a navy ; for the gist of
it, the kernel of the truth, was that the country
had at that time distant interests on the land,
political interests of a high order in the destiny
of foreign territory, of which a distinguishing
characteristic was that they could be assured
only by sea.
Like most stages in a nation's progress, the