This utilitarian and mystical expansion is opposed to the primitive simplicity of the Monroe doctrine. In 1823, to counter the political methods of the Holy Alliance, President Monroe upheld the republican integrity of the ancient Spanish colonies. The celebrated message declared that there were no free territories in America, thus condemning in advance any projected establishment of European colonies upon the unoccupied continent of America, and that the United States limited their political action to the New World, and renounced all intervention in the disputes of Europe. At the close of the last century the political absolutism of the Holy Alliance was only a memory; democracy is progressing, even in the heart of the most despotic of monarchies, and France is republican. Europe, after the tragic adventure of the Mexican Empire, abandoned her expeditions of conquest. The United States, forgetting their initial isolation, intervened in the politics of the world; they defended the integrity of China, took part in the conference of Algeciras, and maintained peace in the East. Like the character in Terence, nothing in the world leaves them unconcerned. The two bases of the Monroe doctrine, the absolutism of Europe and the isolation of the United States, exist no longer, but the Monroe doctrine persists indefinitely. "If," says Mr. Coolidge, professor of political law at the University of Harvard, "if, by his principles, the American finds himself drawn to conclusions which do not please him, he ordinarily revolts, forsakes his promises, and jumps to conclusions that suit him better." To the logic of the Latins Americans and Englishmen oppose utility, common sense, instinct. The Monroe doctrine has undergone an essential transformation; it has passed successively from the {303} defensive to intervention and thence to the offensive. From a theory which condemned any change of political _régime_ among the new democracies under European pressure, and which forbade all acquisitions of territory, or the transfer of power from a weak to a strong nation, there arose the Polk doctrine, which, in 1845, decreed the annexation of Texas for fear of foreign intervention. In 1870 President Grant demanded the seizure of San Domingo as a measure of national protection, a new corollary of the Monroe doctrine. President Johnson was anxious to see his country in possession of Cuba in the name of the "laws of political gravitation which throw small States into the gullets of the great powers." In 1895 Secretary of State Olney, at the time of the trouble between England and Venezuela, declared that the United States were in fact sovereign in America. From Monroe to Olney the defensive doctrine has gradually changed to a moral tutelage.