As to our foreign policy generally, he says he is willing to leave it where Washington placed it, on the sage maxim, "Peace with all nations; entangling alliances with none." The greedy appetite for foreign acquisition which makes us covet our neighbor's lands, and devise cunning schemes to get them, has little of his sympathy. He argues this point briefly, but forcibly, opposing the acquisition of Cuba, and the other islands and Central American countries which would then be demanded. As to buying them, we had better wait till we cease borrowing money to pay current expenses; and before conquering, pause and estimate the cost of rushing into war with all maritime Europe, and half of America. Cuba has much more to fear from us than we have to fear from Cuba. Mr. Bates continues: "But suppose we could get, honestly and peaceably, the whole country, continental and insular, from the Rio Grande to the Orinoco, and from Trinidad to Cuba, and thus establish our _mare clausum_, and shut the gate of the world across the Isthmus, can we govern them wisely and well? For the last few years, in the attempt to govern our home territories of Kansas and Utah, we have not very well maintained the dignity and justice of the nation, nor secured the peace and prosperity of the subject people.... "For my part, I should grieve to have my country become, like Rome, a conquering and dominant nation; for I think there are few or no examples in history, of governments whose chief objects were glory and power, which did ever secure the happiness and prosperity of their own people. Such governments may grow great and famous, and advance a few of their citizens to wealth and nobility, but the price of their grandeur is the personal independence and individual freedom of their people. Still less am I inclined to see absorbed into our system, "on an equal footing with the original States," the various and mixed races (amounting to I know not how many millions) which inhabit the continent and isthmus south of our present border. I am not willing to inoculate our body politic with the virus of their diseases, political and social--diseases which, with them, are chronic and hereditary, and with us could hardly fail to produce corruption in the mind and weakness in the members." The letter concludes as follows: