The chief value of those islands and those shore strips is as naval outposts of the Powers owning them, and they contain but few French, English or Hollanders from their own home countries. Naval outposts against whom? Look at the map. They confront the mouth of our Mississippi River, of our Panama Canal, and of our Nicaragua Canal that is to be. If they are possible naval bases against us, now is the time to use the war-debt situation to protect our taxpayers in the future, as well as relieve foreign taxpayers of today.

If they are naval bases against each other or against other foreign Powers, then all the more reason for our providing now against dangerous contingencies. We do not want any future foreign wars fought near the mouth of our inter-ocean canals or our Mississippi, so near us as to endanger our neutrality. Suppose the battle of the Falkland Islands (that significant contest between Great Britain and Germany) had taken place off British Honduras, close to the Panama Canal; would not our neutrality have been endangered far more than by a contest off a remote South Atlantic island?

It might have been untimely earlier to urge this protective step so obviously important to the principal water highway of the Middle West and the coastwise trade of both our Atlantic and Pacific seaboards, but now is the time when, thanks to President Coolidge's fair minded policy of debt adjustment and Secretary Mellon's admirable conduct of it, definite totals have been assessed for those debts and payments begun upon all, even upon that Agreement still lacking ratification by the French Parliament. Now it has become merely a matter of book-keeping to transfer those possessions to us against reduction or cancellation of debts owed us by England and France. As for Holland, her continued mobilization for defense throughout the war so increased her national debt that her taxpayers would surely be pleased if we reduced their burden by purchase of Dutch Guiana and her adjacent islands.

One of the chief arguments for debt cancellation advanced by the learned Professors advocating it was that the Great War was as much our war as that of the Allies, upon whose territory it was waged, and that they took us in as full partners. But did they?

Partnership means the sharing of assets. At the end of the war, what share did we ask or receive when the sharing of those assets took place? Nothing at all, thank Heaven!

Certain European statesmen have recently permitted themselves to say that American foreign policy lacks coherence, but they overlook our unanimous belief in the Monroe Doctrine. Democrats and Republicans alike support that splendidly defensive document which contains no thought of offensive militarism. Republicans as well as Democrats recall with satisfaction those far-seeing words of Thomas Jefferson in his letter of August 4, 1820, to William Short: "The day is not far distant when we may formally require a medium of partition through the ocean which separates the two Hemispheres, on the hither side of which no European gun shall ever be heard."

The Monroe Doctrine since its very beginning has been a progressive policy, and several Presidents have set up milestones which mark its advance. Let us consider a few such forward steps made in modern times. President Grant said in his message concerning Santo Domingo, May 28, 1870: "The doctrine promulgated by President Monroe has been adhered to by all political parties, and I now deem it proper to assert the equally important principle that hereafter no territory in this Continent shall be regarded as subject of transfer to a European Power.' This means that the present European owners of colonies in this Continent would be infringing the modernized Monroe Doctrine by any transfer of these colonies; also we would feel it our duty to prevent any European creditor of any American Republic from exerting pressure over a cession of land. This forward step of President Grant reminds us that Congress had already in President Madison's time passed the Joint Resolution of January 3, 1811, to prevent England purchasing from Spain the territory which is now our State of Florida.

At the beginning of President Cleveland's negotiations with England in 1895 over the disputed boundary between Venezuela and British Guiana, Lord Salisbury flatly said: "The Government of the United States is not entitled to affirm as a universal proposition, with reference to a number of independent States, for whose conduct it assumes no responsibility, that its interests

are necessarily concerned in whatever may befall them, simply because they are situated in the Western Hemisphere." President Cleveland disagreed with the noble Lord, greatly to the benefit of Venezuela as well as of our national prestige. His reply to Salisbury (contained in his message to Congress) was that the Monroe Doctrine, "important to our peace and safety as a nation, and essential to our free institutions . . . was intended to apply to every stage of our national life, and cannot become obsolete while our Republic endures."

Another important extension of the Doctrine is that Act of our Senate embodied in the so-called Lodge Amendment of 1912:

Resolved, that when any harbor or other place in the American Continents is so situated that the occupation thereof, for naval or military purposes, might threaten the communications or the safety of the United States, the Government of the United States cannot see, without grave concern, the possession of such harbor or other place by any corporation or association which has such a relation to another Government, not American, as to give that Government practical power of control over it for national purposes.

It is doubtful if most Americans realize how significant an advance in the Monroe Doctrine was recently made by President Coolidge, and favorably received by the press and people of our country. It is the most recent milestone in the modernization of the Monroe Doctrine, and is quoted here because it takes into such patriotic account the protection of the Panama Canal. In his admirable address of April 26, 1927, before the United Press in New York City, he said:

Toward the Governments of countries which we have recognized this side of the Panama Canal we feel a moral responsibility that does not attach to other nations. We wish them to feel that our recognition is of real value to them and that they can count on such support as we can lawfully give when they are beset with difficulties. We have undertaken to discourage revolution within that area and to encourage settlements of political difficulties by the peaceful mode of elections. This policy is bound to meet with some discouragement, but it is our hope and belief that ultimately it will prevail.

It is important to notice that these advanced steps taken during the Administrations of five great Presidents, either directly by them or by their influence through the Congress, have each and every one to do with defending the American peace of the

Caribbean Sea. In Madison's time the subject matter was Florida, in Grant's it was Santo Domingo, in Cleveland's Venezuela and British Guiana, while the so-called Lodge Amendment of 1912 (strongly endorsed by President Roosevelt) had to do with the proposed sale of certain strategic Mexican property to a Japanese commercial company. President Coolidge's splendid advance concerns itself with the peace of all the Caribbean littoral, "this side of the Panama Canal”.

When will there ever be a better time than now, since the adjustment of foreign debts to the United States, to gain that "medium of partition through the ocean. . . on the hither side of which no European gun shall ever be heard," so earnestly desired by the far visioned Jefferson in 1820? And, furthermore, now is the time to relieve the taxpayers of England, France and Holland, by reducing their national debts in exchange for their Caribbean possessions, while at the same time we safeguard for our posterity the mouths of our two inter-ocean canals and our Mississippi from dangers of wars originating in other continents than those of the American Hemisphere. Is not this a reasonable middle ground for international debt adjustment?

The foreign press gives its readers to believe that there is now under consideration by the leading European Powers an entire re-shuffle of certain Spheres of Influence around the Mediterranean Sea. That does not concern us; but we and our children's children are vitally concerned in readjusting the situation around our own Mediterranean-the Caribbean Sea.

THE SORROWS OF MENCKEN

BY CATHERINE BEACH ELY

THE exile of Henry Mencken among us ignorant, naïve Americans is a tragedy of modern letters. Self-condemned to this unhappy existence by his own decision, and not by our insistence, he continues to afford us the unparalleled spectacle of his supreme condescension. He endures our stupidities and crudenesses with pained disgust. With what one would call a missionary's zeal, were not the concept missionary so foreign to his taste, he labors to convert us to the sophisticate's viewpoint. He abandons the civilizations of other lands, presumably more in harmony with his fastidious predilections, in order that we Americans may feel the contrast between his lofty intelligence and our inane futilities.

What desperate isolation, that of this apostle of pessimism stranded on the shores of cheerful, constructive America! Constructive-the very word makes the indignant Mencken shudder at the rawness of a nation bent on erecting its own destiny and well being, though undoubtedly this egregiously prosperous country of ours offers a convenient financial environment to the mental alien.

Mencken laments the blundering ineptitude of America's history. With consummate disregard for the fitness of things, we left an enlightened Old World in the Seventeenth Century and embarked in crude boats, landed upon crude shores, and began our crude career. Gathering momentum, our foolishness launched us into the international disagreement of 1917. Not content with the bourgeois obsession for engineering our own destiny, we must needs meddle in the affairs of Europe at a moment when our intrusion was most embarrassing to the theories of the defeatists and to the schedule of the Teutons-our absurd chivalry of 1917 was the bitterest dreg in Mencken's sorrow-cup. Since then he castigates us with the whip-lash of his exasperation.