Finally, the message met the immediate crisis by a bold assertion of the policy of the United States: "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 as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States." [Footnote: Richardson, Messages and Papers, II., 207-218; cf. Hart, Foundations of Am. Foreign Policy, chap. vii.] Herein was the assertion of the well- established opposition of the United States to the doctrine of intervention as violating the equality of nations. It was the affirmation also of the equality of the Old and the New World in diplomatic relations, and the announcement of the paramount interest of the United States in American affairs. [Footnote: Moore, "Non- Intervention and the Monroe Doctrine," in Harper's Mag., CIX., 857.]
This classic statement of the position of the United States in the New World, therefore, applied an old tendency on the part of this country to a particular exigency. Its authorship can hardly be attributed to any single individual, but its peculiar significance at this juncture lay in the fact that the United States came forward, unconnected with Europe, as the champion of the autonomy and freedom of America, and declared that the era of European colonization in the New World had passed away. The idea of an American system, under the leadership of the United States, unhampered by dependence upon European diplomacy, had been eloquently and clearly voiced by Henry Clay in 1820. But John Quincy Adams also reached the conception of an independent American system, and to him belongs the credit for the doctrine that the two Americas were closed to future political colonization. His office of secretary of state placed him where he was able to insist upon a consistent, clear-cut, and independent expression of the doctrine of an American system. Monroe's was the honor of taking the responsibility for these utterances. [Footnote: Cf. Reddaway, Monroe Doctrine, chap, v.; and Ford, in Am. Hist. Rev., VII., 676, VIII., 28.]
Canning afterwards boasted, "I called the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old." [Footnote: Stapleton, Political Life of Canning, III., 227.] Unquestionably his determination that "if France had Spain it should not be Spain with the Indies," materially contributed to make effective the protest of the United States, and he recognized the value of the president's message in putting an end to the proposal of a European congress. "It was broken," said he, "in all its limbs before, but the president's message gives it the coup de grace." [Footnote: Stapleton, George Canning and His Times, 395.]
Nevertheless, the assertion by the United States of an American system independent of Europe, and the proposed exclusion of Europe from further colonization were, in truth, as obnoxious to England as they were to France. [Footnote: Reddaway, Monroe Doctrine, 98.] "The great danger of the time," declared Canning in 1825, shortly after the British recognition of Mexico, "—a danger which the policy of the European system would have fostered—was a division of the world into European and American, republican and monarchical; a league of worn-out governments on the one hand and of youthful and stirring nations, with the United States at their head, on the other. WE slip in between, and plant ourselves in Mexico. The United States have gotten the start of us in vain, and we link once more America to Europe." On December 17, 1824, Canning wrote: "Spanish America is free; and if we do not mismanage our matters sadly, she is English, and novus saeclorum nascitur ordo." [Footnote: Festing, J.H. Frere and His Friends, 267, quoted by E.M. Lloyd, in Royal Hist. Soc. Transactions (new series), XVIII., 77, 93.]
Later events were to reveal how unsubstantial were the hopes of the British minister. For the present, his hands were tied by the fact that England and the United States had a common interest in safeguarding Spanish America; and the form of Monroe's declaration seemed less important than its effectiveness in promoting this result. In the United States the message was received with approbation. Although Clay, from considerations of policy, withdrew a resolution which he presented to Congress (January 20,1824), giving legislative endorsement to the doctrine, [Footnote: Annals of Cong., 18 Cong., 1 Sess., I., 1104, II., 2763.] there was no doubt of the sympathy of the American people with its fundamental principles. Together with the attitude of England, it put an end to the menace of the Holy Alliance on this side of the ocean, and it began a new chapter, yet unfinished, in the history of the predominance of the United States in the New World.
CHAPTER XIII
INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS (1818-1824)
The transformation by which the slender line of the Indian trail became the trader's trace, and then a road, superseded by the turnpike and canal, and again replaced by the railroad, is typical of the economic development of the United States. As the population of the west increased, its surplus products sought outlets. Improved means of communication became essential, and when these were furnished the new lines of internal trade knitted the nation into organic unity and replaced the former colonial dependence upon Europe, in the matter of commerce, by an extensive domestic trade between the various sections. From these changes flowed important political results. [Footnote: For the earlier phase of internal improvements, cf. Babcock, Am. Nationality (Am. Nation, XIII.), chap. xv.]
Many natural obstacles checked this process. The Appalachian mountain system cut off the seaboard of the United States from the interior. From the beginning, the Alleghenies profoundly influenced the course of American history, and at one time even endangered the permanency of the Union. In our own day the railroad has so reduced the importance of these mountains that it is difficult for us to realize the part which they once played in our development. Although Webster boasted that there were no Alleghenies in his politics, we have already seen [Footnote: See chaps, iii., vi., above.] that in the twenties they exercised a dominant influence on the lines of internal commerce, and compelled the pioneer farmers to ship their surplus down the Mississippi to New Orleans and around the coast, and thence abroad and to the cities of the north. The difficult and expensive process of wagoning goods from Philadelphia and Baltimore across the mountains to the Ohio Valley raised the price of manufactured goods to the western farmer; while, on the other hand, the cost of transportation for his crops left him little profit and reduced the value of his lands. [Footnote: Journ. of Polit. Econ., VIII., 36-41.]
Under these circumstances, it was inevitable that the natural opportunities furnished by the water system of the Great Lakes and the widely ramifying tributaries of the Mississippi should appeal to statesmen who considered the short distances that intervened between these navigable waters and the rivers that sought the Atlantic. Turnpikes and canals had already shown themselves practicable and profitable in England, so a natural effort arose to use them in aid of that movement for connecting east and west by ties of interest which Washington had so much at heart. New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, all subdivided by the mountains into eastern and western sections, fostered roads and chartered turnpike and canal companies. Pennsylvania was pre-eminent in this movement even before the close of the eighteenth century, subscribing large amounts to the stock of turnpike companies in order to promote the trade between Philadelphia and the growing population in the region of Pittsburgh. So numerous were the projects and beginnings of roads and canals in the nation, that as early as 1808 the far-sighted Gallatin made his famous report for a complete national system of roads and canals. [Footnote: Cf. Hart, Slavery and Abolition (Am. Nation, XVI.), chap. iii.]