In the south the A.B.C., the alliance of the Argentine, Brazil, and Chili, is the question incessantly discussed in the sensational press, and in the chancelleries, which love to surround themselves with an atmosphere of mystery. These three nations, wealthy, military powers, situated in distinct zones, are seeking confederation; their ambition is to exercise in America a tutelage which they consider indispensable. Already the understanding of May, 1902, had limited the armaments of Chili and the Argentine, and had put an end to a long conflict. The rivality between the Argentine and Brazil; the old friendship between that country and Chili, which afterwards changed to a jealous alienation; the rivalry between the Argentine {349} and Chili in the matter of wealth and power; discord, threats of war, uneasy friendships; all this is insufficient to restrain the military ambition of the three great nations. The statesmen of Buenos-Ayres, Rio de Janeiro, and Santiago are labouring to effect the realisation of an alliance between the three most highly civilised and organised and most advanced nations of the continent. Once this union is accomplished, to the indisputable influence of the United States will be added the moderative influence of the three great States of the South, and the equilibrium between Latins and Anglo-Saxons would be its immediate result. There are writers in America who defend the chauvinistic autonomy of small countries as against the natural supremacy of such combinations of States. It is, however, certain that these alliances do not in any way threaten the countries which take part in them; they respect their internal constitution, and their historic organisation; they confine themselves to a fusion of general and external interests, to matters of commerce, and of peace and war. These utilitarian partisans of the independence of each separate nation cannot conceive of the grouping of nations as in the Greater Colombia, the Confederation of the Pacific, or the Southern Alliance, without the existence of obvious commercial interests. It is certainly true that the _Zollverein_, or permanent customs agreement, was the basis of German unity. But there are moral interests as powerful and as obvious as the interests of commerce. Should not a common danger, such as the Yankee peril in Panama and Central America, impel nations toward federation and unity?