The consequences of this successful and momentous assertion of the Monroe Doctrine may now be traced. Three times within the century of its declaration the doctrine was firmly asserted and maintained by the United States as the public system of the Western World, for it may with entire propriety be called our public system, as the concert of Europe is the public system of that continent. First, when President Monroe proclaimed it as a warning to the Holy Alliance, plotting the restoration to Spain of her revolted colonies in Latin America. Second, when Secretary Seward’s repeated protests against the establishment of an empire and an emperor, the Austrian Maximilian, in Mexico against the will of the people by French arms, were ominously reinforced by the despatch of General Sheridan to the banks of the Rio Grande with 80,000 disciplined and experienced troops, freed from active service by the ending of the war between the States, the French evacuation of Mexico speedily following. The absence of any mention of the Monroe Doctrine in Secretary Seward’s correspondence in respect to the French adventurer in Mexico is without significance. The spirit and the principle of Monroe’s declaration were the declared motives of his action. Third, when President Cleveland, by virtue of the doctrine, “intended to apply to every stage of our National life,” constrained England to submit her boundary dispute with Venezuela to a judicial settlement. The next application of the doctrine, the fourth in this series, all of primary importance, fell within the present century, when the substitution of the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty for the Clayton-Bulwer convention of half a century earlier dissolved our partnership with Great Britain in an agreement to extend a joint protectorship over any transportation route across the isthmus, and so cleared the way for the building and exclusive control by ourselves of the Panama Canal.