But, while this is true, the United States has had in the past abundant experience of disputes, in which, though she believed herself right, even to the point of having a just casus belli, the other party has not seemed to share the same conviction.  These difficulties, chiefly, though not solely, territorial in character, have been the natural bequest of the colonial condition through which this hemisphere passed on its way to its present political status.  Her own view of right, even when conceded in the end, has not approved itself at first to the other party to the dispute.  Fortunately these differences have been mainly with Great Britain, the great and beneficent colonizer, a state between which and ourselves a sympathy, deeper than both parties have been ready always to admit, has continued to exist, because founded upon common fundamental ideas of law and justice.  Of this the happy termination of the Venezuelan question is the most recent but not the only instance.

It is sometimes said that Great Britain is the most unpopular state in Europe.  If this be so,—­and many of her own people seem to accept the fact of her political isolation, though with more or less of regret,—­is there nothing significant to us in that our attitude towards her in the Venezuelan matter has not commanded the sympathy of Europe, but rather the reverse?  Our claim to enter, as of right, into a dispute not originally our own, and concerning us only as one of the American group of nations, has been rejected in no doubtful tones by organs of public opinion which have no fondness for Great Britain.  Whether any foreign government has taken the same attitude is not known,—­probably there has been no official protest against the apparent admission of a principle which binds nobody but the parties to it.  Do we ourselves realize that, happy as the issue of our intervention has been, it may entail upon us greater responsibilities, more serious action, than we have assumed before? that it amounts in fact—­if one may use a military metaphor—­to occupying an advanced position, the logical result very likely of other steps in the past, but which nevertheless implies necessarily such organization of strength as will enable us to hold it?

Without making a picture to ourselves, without conjuring up extravagant contingencies, it is not difficult to detect the existence of conditions, in which are latent elements of future disputes, identical in principle with those through which we have passed heretofore.  Can we expect that, if unprovided with adequate military preparation, we shall receive from other states, not imbued with our traditional habits of political thought, and therefore less patient of our point of view, the recognition of its essential reasonableness which has been conceded by the government of Great Britain?  The latter has found capacity for sympathy with our attitude,—­not only by long and close contact and interlacing of interests between the two peoples,