"'No pent-up Utica contracts our powers,
But the whole boundless continent is ours.
That is the popular paraphrase of the Monroe doctrine. And the popular
voice has favoured - aye, and the greatest statesmen among them have
looked upon it as inevitable - an extension of the principles of
democracy over this continent. Now, I suppose a universal democracy is
no more acceptable to us than a universal monarchy in Europe would have
been to our ancestors; yet for three centuries - from Charles V. to
Napoleon - our fathers combated to the death against the subjugation of
all Europe to a single system or a single master, and heaped up a debt
which has since burdened the producing classes of the Empire with an
enormous load of taxation, which, perhaps, none other except the hardy
and ever-growing industry of those little islands could have borne up
under. The idea of a universal democracy in America is no more welcome
to the minds of thoughtful men among us than was that of a universal
monarchy to the minds of the thoughtful men who followed the standard
of the third William, or who afterwards, under the great Marlborough,
opposed the armies of the particular dynasty that sought to place
Europe under a single dominion.
"But if we are to have a universal democracy on this continent, the
Lower Provinces - the smaller fragments - will be 'gobbled up' first, and
we will come in afterwards by way of dessert.
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