be invited—­on the same pledge:  the preservation of territorial integrity.  If Germany should come in, she will thereby practically acknowledge the Monroe Doctrine, as England has already done.  If Germany stay out, then she can’t complain.  England and the United States would have only to announce their intention:  there’d be no need to fire a gun.  Besides settling the Mexican trouble, we’d gain much—­having had England by our side in a praise-worthy enterprise.  That, and the President’s visit[36] would give the world notice to whom it belongs, and cause it to be quiet and to go about its proper business of peaceful industry.

Moreover, it would show all the Central and South American States that we don’t want any of their territory, that we will not let anybody else have any, but that they, too, must keep orderly government or the great Nations of the earth, will, at our bidding, forcibly demand quiet in their borders.  I believe a new era of security would come in all Spanish America.  Investments would be safer, governments more careful and orderly.  And—­we would not have made any entangling alliance with anybody.  All this would prevent perhaps dozens of little wars.  It’s merely using the English fleet and ours to make the world understand that the time has come for orderliness and peace and for the honest development of backward, turbulent lands and peoples.

If you don’t put this through, tell me what’s the matter with it.  I’ve sent it to Washington after talking and being talked to for a month and after the hardest kind of thinking.  Isn’t this constructive?  Isn’t it using the great power lying idle about the world, to do the thing that most needs to be done?

Colonel House presented this memorandum to the President, but events sufficiently disclosed that it had no influence upon his Mexican policy.  Two days after it was written Mr. Wilson went before Congress, announced that the Lind Mission had failed, and that conditions in Mexico had grown worse.  He advised all Americans to leave the country, and declared that he would lay an embargo on the shipment of munitions—­an embargo that would affect both the Huerta forces and the revolutionary groups that were fighting them.

Meanwhile Great Britain had taken another step that made as unpleasant an impression on Washington as had the recognition of Huerta.  Sir Lionel Edward Gresley Carden had for several years been occupying British diplomatic posts in Central America, in all of which he had had disagreeable social and diplomatic relations with Americans.  Sir Lionel had always shown great zeal in promoting British commercial interests, and, justly or unjustly, had acquired the fame of being intensely anti-American.  From 1911 to 1913 Carden had served as British Minister to Cuba; here his anti-Americanism had shown itself in such obnoxious ways that Mr. Knox, Secretary of State under President Taft, had instructed