In a later section of the same message the proposition was also advanced that the American continent was no longer subject to colonization. This clause of the doctrine was the work of Monroe's secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, and its occasion was furnished by the fear that Russia was planning to set up a colony at San Francisco, then the property of Spain, whose natural heir on the North American continent, Adams held, was the United States. It is this clause of the document that has furnished much of the basis for its subsequent development. In 1902 Germany united with Great Britain and Italy to collect by force certain claims against Venezuela. President Roosevelt demanded and finally, after threatening to dispatch Admiral Dewey to the scene of action, obtained a statement that she would not permanently occupy Venezuelan territory. Of this statement one of the most experienced and trusted American editors, avowedly friendly to Germany, remarked at the time, that while he believed "it was and will remain true for some time to come, I cannot, in view of the spirit now evidently dominant in the mind of the emperor and among many who stand near him, express any belief that such assurances will remain trustworthy for any great length of time after Germany shall have developed a fleet larger than that of the United States." He accordingly cautioned the United States "to bear in mind probabilities and possibilities as to the future conduct of Germany, and therefore increase gradually our naval strength." Bismarck pronounced the Monroe Doctrine "an international impertinence," and this has been the German view all along. Dr. Zorn, one of the most conservative of German authorities on international affairs, concluded an article in Die Woche of September 13, 1913, with these words: "Considered in all its phases, the Monroe Doctrine is in the end seen to be a question of might only and not of right." The German government's efforts to check American influence in the Latin American states had of late years been frequent and direct. They comprised the encouragement of German emigration to certain regions, the sending of agents to maintain close contact, presentation of German flags in behalf of the Kaiser, the placing of the German Evangelical churches in certain South American countries under the Prussian State Church, annual grants for educational purposes from the imperial treasury at Berlin, and the like. The "Lodge resolution," adopted by the senate in 1912, had in view the activities of certain German corporations in Latin America, as well as the episode that immediately occasioned it; nor can there be much doubt that it was the secret interference by Germany at Copenhagen that thwarted the sale of the Danish West Indies to the United States in 1903.