Fail though we may in the will, the intelligence, or the power to carry it out, the systematic effort to establish a peaceable American system is just as plain and just as inevitable a consequence of the democratic national principle, as is the effort to make our domestic institutions contribute to the work of individual and social amelioration.
III DEMOCRACY AND PEACE A genuinely national foreign policy for the American democracy is not exhausted by the Monroe Doctrine.

The United States already has certain colonial interests; and these interests may hereafter be extended.

I do not propose at the present stage of this discussion to raise the question as to the legitimacy in principle of a colonial policy on the part of a democratic nation.

The validity of colonial expansion even for a democracy is a manifest deduction from the foregoing political principles, always assuming that the people whose independence is thereby diminished are incapable of efficient national organization.

On the other hand, a democratic nation cannot righteously ignore an unusually high standard of obligation for the welfare of its colonial population.