OUR INCONSISTENT MONROE DOCTRINE
"If you want war, nourish a doctrine. Doctrines are the most frightful tyrants to which men ever are subject, because doctrines get inside of a man's own reason and betray him against himself."
William Graham Sumner, "War and Other Essays."
A doctrine is a creed, usually mandatory, framed by one person or set of persons, for the belief or conduct of another person or set of persons. A doctrine is not necessarily based upon principles of right, equity, justice, or even expediency.
Doctrines are directions written on the guide-boards of fanaticism. An exact truth is never proclaimed as a doctrine: there is no doctrine of mathematics.
The Monroe Doctrine, which pledged the United States to defend American republican institutions, north and south, against monarchical encroachments from the Old World, with the dependable support of England, was proclaimed in 1823, mainly in response to a Continental doctrine called the Holy Alliance, formed in 1815 by and between Austria, Russia, Prussia, and France. The Holy Alliance was in effect a system of mutual political monarchical insurance, under which the forces of the allied Powers could be used to subdue revolution against the institution of kingship.
The French Revolution, followed by the democratic empire of Napoleon, had severely shaken the old intolerant and intolerable order of things. The Holy Alliance was an expedient of the old order to insure itself against democratic institutions.
A revolution in Spain in 1820 was promptly suppressed by the Holy Alliance, and the Spanish people, who had raised their heads and begun to look around for freedom, were again bowed under the yoke of the detested Bourbons. The Holy Alliance was surely a most unholy alliance.
Russia, by a ukase in 1821, claimed the right to keep the vessels of all other Powers out of the North Pacific Ocean. That was a Russian "Monroe Doctrine" which helped to make Monroe a doctrinaire.
In 1823 Spain lost, through revolutions, all of her American possessions except Cuba and Porto Rico, and Portugal had lost Brazil. France had lost the island of Haiti.
The United States naturally sympathized with the newly-formed states built on the ruins of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. They had mostly adopted republican institutions, becoming sisters of the great northern republic.