Yet the voters have, since 1893, determined some aspects of our foreign policy. They did not vote on a loan to China, but they did keep in power the party that made war in Spain, bought the Philippines, protected Cuba, and policed Central America. This tentative imperialism was never the supreme issue of a campaign; the Republican Party had always a better one, which was prosperity. In the early twentieth century, the American voter only accepted, he did not directly approve, the beginnings of a new international outlook. Our tradition is obviously not going to help us here; but there is another--the tradition of democratic control. It has not begun to operate in foreign affairs; before it can operate, we will have to clear our minds of some romantic illusions. Our future lies balanced between Europe and Asia; the disagreeable certainty, like a chill in our bones now, is that we cannot escape the world. We still think of participation in world affairs negatively as a favor we may, if we choose, bestow on less favored nations, or as a mere necessity to keep the plagues of war and tyranny quarantined from our shores. The prospect is disagreeable because we, the people, have no experience of international affairs; we have not yet made over diplomacy as we have made over domestic politics. We have begun to send newspapermen into foreign lands and to trust them more than we trust our ambassadors--because the journalists have begun to democratize diplomacy. They have told us more, they have often represented us more completely, and represented international business less; they have been curious, indiscreet, and generally unaffected by the snobbery which used to ruin our ministers to smart European capitals. The correspondents have taken the characteristic American democratic way of altering an ancient European institution, by shrewdly publicised disrespect. Whenever we have had a strong Secretary of State, something further has been done; but the permanent officials of our State Department have completely accepted the European style of international dealings; they have been so aware, and ashamed, of being born on the wrong side of the Atlantic sheets, that all the brash independence of America has been hushed; our leading career diplomats have never been Americanized by the middle west; they came from an almost alien institution, the private school; they represented smart cosmopolitanism disproportionately; they represented the East, banking, leisure, intellectualism; they did not represent America. On occasions, political chance brought a son of the wild jackass into the State Department, or gave him an embassy; and the pained professionals had to resort to the language of diplomacy for the _gaffes_ and _gaucheries_ of American diplomacy. These awkward Americans were slipping all over the polished floors of the chancelleries of Europe; but they were not falling into the hands of the European diplomats.