Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/526

502 as a war of emancipation and humanity into a land-grabbing operation, will be capable of anything in the line of deceit and rapacity; that its appetite will grow with the eating; that having once embarked in a career of conquest, it will be urged from one such enterprise into another, on the plausible plea that new conquests are necessary to make the old ones secure and profitable; that nobody can tell how far this will go; and that therefore none of the sister republics will be safe from the perfidy and grasping ambition of the United States? Nobody will deny that there is logic in this; and being started on this line of thought, the American sister republics will cast about for means of protection; and if to that end they do not find a league among themselves against the United States practical or sufficient, it will not at all be unnatural for them to look for that protection to some of the old-world Powers.

This is by no means a mere wild conjecture. A little sober reflection will convince every thinking mind that the first step on our part in this new policy of conquest will be very apt to fill the minds of our southern neighbors with that vague dread of some great danger hanging over them which will turn them into secret or open enemies of the United States, capable of throwing themselves into anybody's arms for protection; and this will not at all be unlikely to encourage, among old-world Powers, schemes of encroachment upon the American continent which, on account of the former relations between the smaller American republics and the United States under the Monroe Doctrine, have so far not ventured forth. This would be to the United States the beginning of incalculable troubles of a new sort. And then these very troubles arising from southern hostility, combining with the ambitious schemes of old-world Powers, would be used by our imperialists as additional proof of the