Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/932

864 voted to the subject a long passage. The substance of it is, however, conveyed in a few sentences. After adverting to the abstention of the United States from European wars and to the dangers to be apprehended from the system of the allied powers, he declared: "We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers, to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the governments who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power, in any other light than a manifestation of an unfriendly disposition towards the United States."

The sentences just quoted specially relate to the aims of the Holy Alliance; but there is another passage in the message which is also often cited as embodying the Monroe Doctrine. In 1821, the Emperor of Russia issued a ukase, by which he assumed, as owner of the shore, to exclude foreigners from carrying on commerce and from navigating and fishing within a hundred Italian miles of the northwest coast of America, from Bering Strait down to the 51st parallel of north latitude. As this assertion of title embraced territory which was claimed by the United States as well as by Great Britain, both those governments protested against it. In consequence the Russian government proposed to adjust the matter by amicable negotiation; and instructions to that end were prepared by John Quincy Adams for the American ministers at London and St. Petersburg. At a meeting of the cabinet on June 28, 1823, while the subject was under discussion, Adams expressed the opinion that the claim of the Russians could not be admitted, because they appeared to have no "settlement" upon the territory in dispute; and on July 17 he informed Baron Tuyl, then Russian minister at Washington, "that we [the United States] should contest the right of Russia to any territorial establishment on this continent, and that we should assume distinctly the principle that the American continents are no longer subjects for any new European colonial establishments." With reference to this subject, President Monroe, in the message above quoted, said: "In the discussions to which this interest has given rise, and in the arrangements by which they may terminate, the occasion has been judged proper for asserting as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers."

By the term "future colonization" President Monroe evidently intended to convey the same meaning as was expressed by the terms "settlement" and "colonial establishments" previously employed by Adams. They were used to denote, what they were then commonly understood to mean, the acquisition of title to territory by original occupation and settlement. But in the course of time the phrase "future colonization" came to receive a broader interpretation. President Polk, in his annual message of December 2, 1845, declared that, while existing rights of every European nation should be respected, it should be "distinctly announced to the world as our settled policy that no future European colony or dominion shall, with our consent, be planted or established on any part of the North-American Continent." By pronouncing against the establishment by a European power of any "dominion"—a term which included even the voluntary transfer of territory already occupied—President Polk expressed a conception which has come generally to prevail, and which is embodied in the popular phrase, "No more European colonies on these continents." The same meaning is conveyed in the phrase, "America for the Americans," which signifies that no European power shall be permitted to acquire new territory or to extend its dominions in the Western Hemisphere.