Page 174 - The interest of America in sea power, present and future

American Naval Power. 155

act upon disinterested motives. It is not as an
utterance of passing concern, benevolent or self-
ish, but because it voiced an enduring prin-
ciple of necessary self-interest, that the Monroe
doctrine has retained its vitality, and has been
made so easily to do duty as the expression of
intuitive national sensitiveness to occurrences
of various kinds in regions beyond the sea.
At its christening the principle was directed
against an apprehended intervention in Ameri-
can affairs, which depended not upon actual
European concern in the territory involved,
but upon a purely political arrangement be-
tween certain great powers, itself the result of
ideas at the time moribund. In its first appli-
cation, therefore, it was a confession that dan-
ger of European complications did exist, under
conditions far less provocative of real European
interest than those which now obtain and are
continually growing. Its subsequent applica-
tions have been many and various, and the
incidents giving rise to them have been in-
creasingly important, culminating up to the
present in the growth of the United States to
be a great Pacific power, and in her probable
dependence in the near future upon an Isth-