The Spanish American colonies had not the same preparation for independence that we had.  Each of the British colonies possessed complete local autonomy.  Its formal transition from dependence to independence consisted chiefly in expelling the British governor of the colony and electing a governor of the State, from which to the organized Union was but a step.  All these conditions of success were wanting in Spanish America, and hence many of the difficulties in their career as independent states; and, further, while the revolution in British America was the exclusive result of the march of opinion in the British colonies, the simultaneous action of the separate Spanish colonies, though showing a desire for independence, was principally produced by the accident of the invasion of Spain by France.

The formation of these new sovereignties in America was important to us, not only because of the cessation of colonial monopolies to that extent, but because of the geographical relations to us held by so many new nations, all, like ourselves, created from European stock and interested in excluding European politics, dynastic questions, and balances of power from further influence in the New World.

Thus the United States were forced into new lines of action, which, though apparently in some respects conflicting, were really in harmony with the line marked out by Washington.  The avoidance of entangling political alliances and the maintenance of our own independent neutrality became doubly important from the fact that they became applicable to the new Republics as well as to the mother country.  The duty of noninterference had been admitted by every President.  The question came up in the time of the first Adams, on the occasion of the enlistment projects of Miranda.  It appeared again under Jefferson (anterior to the revolt of the Spanish colonies) in the schemes of Aaron Burr.  It was an ever-present question in the Administrations of Madison, Monroe, and the younger Adams, in reference to the questions of foreign enlistment or equipment in the United States, and when these new Republics entered the family of nations, many of them very feeble, and all too much subject to internal revolution and civil war, a strict adherence to our previous policy and a strict enforcement of our laws became essential to the preservation of friendly relations with them; for since that time it has been one of the principal cares of those intrusted with the administration of the Government to prevent piratical expeditions against these sister Republics from leaving our ports.  And thus the changed condition of the New World made no change in the traditional and peaceful policy of the United States in this respect.