The Monroe doctrine takes an aggressive form with Mr. Roosevelt, the politician of the "big stick," and intervention _à outrance_. Roosevelt is conscious of his sacred mission; he wants a powerful army, and a navy majestically sailing the two oceans. His ambitions find an unlooked-for commentary in a book by Mr. Archibald Coolidge, the Harvard professor, upon the United States as a world-power. He therein shows the origin of the disquietude of the South Americans before the Northern peril: "When two {305} contiguous States," he writes, "are separated by a long line of frontiers and one of the two rapidly increases, full of youth and vigour, while the other possesses, together with a small population, rich and desirable territories, and is troubled by continual revolutions which exhaust and weaken it, the first will inevitably encroach upon the second, just as water will always seek to regain its own level." He recognises the fact that the progress accomplished by the United States is not of a nature to tranquillise the South American; "that the Yankee believes that his southern neighbours are trivial and childish peoples, and above all incapable of maintaining a proper self-government." He thinks the example of Cuba, liberated "from the rule of Spain, but not from internal troubles, will render the American of the States sceptical as to the aptitude of the Latin-American populations of mixed blood to govern themselves without disorder," and recognises that the "pacific penetration" of Mexico by American capital constitutes a possible menace to the independence of that Republic, were the death of Diaz to lead to its original state of anarchy and disturb the peace which the millionaires of the North desire to see untroubled. Warnings, advice, distrust, invasion of capital, plans of financial hegemony--all these justify the anxiety of the southern peoples. The people of the United States have always desired a _Zollverein_, a fiscal union of all the Republics; they wish to gather into their imperial hands the commerce of the South, the produce of the tropics. The unity of the German Empire was born of a _Zollverein_ or customs union, and perhaps in the future the same means will create that eternal empire of which the patriotism of Mr. Chamberlain used to dream. The United States, according to candid Professor Coolidge, are, in respect of Latin {306} America, in a position analogous to that of Russia in respect of the nations of the _Zollverein_: their population is greater and more imposing. "History shows us," he writes, "that when feeble states and powerful states are closely associated the independence of the weak states runs certain risks."[1] The Yankee ideal, then, is fatally contrary to Latin-American independence.