[1] See _A America latina_, Porto, 1907, p. 323. M. Onésime Reclus gives the same advice to the Lusitanians of America: "In each State, in each municipality, let those charged with the partition of the soil see that they establish no Polish, German, English, or Irish colonies unless they also establish Spanish, Portuguese, Brazilian, French, and Italian, or analogous colonies; let no colony be formed exclusively of people of a single nationality, but well divided among colonists speaking different tongues; and if such a law be strictly observed Latin America may resist the fatal onset of Slav or German Europe" (_Le Partage du Monde_, p. 278). {298} CHAPTER III THE NORTH AMERICAN PERIL The policy of the United States--The Monroe doctrine: its various aspects--Greatness and decadence of the United States--The two Americas, Latin and Anglo-Saxon. To save themselves from Yankee imperialism the American democracies would almost accept a German alliance, or the aid of Japanese arms; everywhere the Americans of the North are feared. In the Antilles and in Central America hostility against the Anglo-Saxon invaders assumes the character of a Latin crusade. Do the United States deserve this hatred? Are they not, as their diplomatists preach, the elder brothers, generous and protecting? And is not protection their proper vocation in a continent rent by anarchy? We must define the different aspects of their activities in South America; a summary examination of their influence could not fail to be unjust. They have conquered new territories, but they have upheld the independence of feeble States; they aspire to the hegemony of the Latin continent, but this ambition has prevented numerous and grievous conflicts between South American nations. The moral pressure of the United States makes itself felt everywhere; the imperialist and maternal Republic intervenes in all the internal conflicts of the Spanish-speaking democracies. It excites or suppresses revolutions; it fulfils a high vocation of culture. It {299} uses or abuses a privilege which cannot be gainsaid. The better to protect the Ibero-Americans, it has proudly raised its Pillars of Hercules against the ambition of the Old World. Sometimes this influence becomes a monopoly, and the United States take possession of the markets of the South. They aim at making a trust of the South American republics, the supreme dream of their multi-millionaire _conquistadors_. Alberdi has said that there they are the "Puerto Cabello" of the new America; that is to say, that they aim, after the Spanish fashion, at isolating the southern continent and becoming its exclusive purveyors of ideas and industries.