James Buchanan, then our Minister to England, in a memorandum for Lord Clarendon, written on January 6, 1854, referring to the relation of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty to the Monroe Doctrine, said that while that doctrine would be maintained whenever the peace and safety of the United States made it necessary, “yet to have acted upon it in Central America might have brought us into collision with Great Britain, an event always to be deplored, and if possible avoided”; therefore these “dangerous questions” were settled by a resort to friendly negotiations. In view of the flimsy nature of Great Britain’s asserted rights in Central America, and of the manifest unfriendliness of the motives that had prompted her to plant her flag, her colonies, and her forts in the pathway of communication between our Atlantic and Pacific coasts, it must be said that Mr. Buchanan’s memorandum could not easily have been outdone in politeness. The sounder opinion, the opinion which the country has held and acted upon, is expressed by Francis Wharton in that edition of the “Digest of International Law of the United States” which he edited: For Great Britain to assume in whole or in part a protectorate of the Isthmus or of an interoceanic canal, viewing the term protectorate in the sense in which she viewed it in respect to the Belise and the Mosquito country, would be to antagonize the Monroe Doctrine; and for the United States to unite with her in such a protectorship would be to connive at such antagonism. The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, if it were to be construed so as to put the Isthmus under the joint protectorate of Great Britain and the United States, would not only conflict with the Monroe Doctrine, by introducing a European Power in the management of the affairs of this continent, but it would be a gross departure from those traditions, consecrated by the highest authorities to which we can appeal, by which we are forbidden to enter into “entangling alliances” with European Powers. No “alliance” could be more “entangling” than one with Great Britain to control not only the Isthmus, but the interoceanic trade of this continent. No introduction of a foreign Power could be more fatal to the policy of Mr. Monroe, by which America was to be prevented from being the theatre of new European domination, than that which would give to Great Britain a joint control of the continent in one of its most vital interests.