In the first place, the two fundamental motives which gave rise to the doctrine, and in which all important documents are so clearly enunciated from the time of Washington to that of Monroe, have long since ceased to exist. The contrast between Europe as the land of tyranny and America as a democratic free soil, no longer holds; nor can the notion be bolstered up any longer, even for political ends. In the first place all countries of Western Europe now enjoy popular representation, while the Latin republics of South America, with the exception of Chili and the Argentine Republic, are the most absurd travesties of freedom and democracy. Conditions in Venezuela and Colombia are now pretty well known. It has been shown, for instance, that about one-tenth of the population consists of highly cultivated Spaniards, who take no part in politics, and suffer under a shameless administrative misrule; that some eight-tenths more are a harmless and ignorant proletariat of partly Spanish and partly Indian descent—people who likewise have no political interest, and who are afraid of the men in power—while the remaining tenth, which is of mixed Spanish, Indian, and negro blood, holds in its hands the so-called republican government, and keeps itself in power with every device of extortion and deception, and from time to time splits up into parties which throw the whole country into an uproar, merely for the personal advantages of the party leaders.
Even in America there is no longer a political back-woodsman who supposes that a republic like what the founders of the United States had in mind, can ever be made out of such material; and when, in spite of this, as in the negro question, some one gets up at the decisive moment of every discussion and tries to conjure with the Declaration of Independence, even such an appeal now often misses its effect. Since the Americans have gone into the Philippines they can no longer hold it an axiom that every government must be justified by the assent of the governed. People have learned to understand that the right of self-government must be earned, and is deserved only as the reward of hard work; that nations which have not yet grown to be orderly and peaceable need education like children who are not yet of age and do not know what is good for them. To say that the pitiable citizen of a corrupt South American republic is freer than the citizen of England, France, or Germany would be ridiculous; to protect the anarchy of these countries against the introduction of some European political system is at the present time not a moral obligation, surely, which the American Republic need feel itself called on to perform. The democratic idea, as realized in American life, has become much more influential on the governments of Europe than on those of South America, notwithstanding their lofty constitutions, which are filled with the most high-flown moral and philosophical utterances, but are obeyed by no one.