It is not here merely or mainly the question of a right: American foreign policy has before it much the same alternatives with reference to the world as a whole, as were presented to Great Britain with reference to the Continent in the generation which preceded the War. Her "splendid isolation" was defended on grounds which very closely resemble those now put forward by America as the basis of the same policy. Isolation meant, of course, preponderance of power, and when she declared her intention to use that power only on behalf of even-handed justice, she not only meant it, but carried out the intention, at least to an extent that no other nation has done. She accorded a degree of equality in economic treatment which is without parallel. One thing only led her to depart from justice: that was the need of maintaining the supremacy. For this she allowed herself to become involved in certain exceedingly entangling Alliances. Indeed, Great Britain found that at no period of her history were her domestic politics so much dominated by the foreign situation as when she was proclaiming to the world her splendid isolation from foreign entanglements. It is as certain, of course, that American "isolation" would mean that the taxation of Gopher Prairie would be settled in Tokio; and that tens of thousands of American youth would be sentenced to death by unknown elderly gentlemen in a European Cabinet meeting. If the American retorts that his country is in a fundamentally different position, because Great Britain possesses an Empire and America does not, that only proves how very much current ideas in politics fail to take cognizance of the facts. The United States to-day has in the problem of the Philippines, their protection and their trade, and the bearing of those things upon Japanese policy; in Hayti and the West Indies, and their bearing upon America's subject nationality problem of the negro; in Mexico, which is likely to provide America with its Irish problem; in the Panama Canal tolls question and its relation to the development of a mercantile marine and naval competition with Great Britain, in these things alone, to mention no others, subjects of conflict, involving defence of American interests, out of which will arise entanglements not differing greatly in kind from the foreign questions which dominated British domestic policy during the period of British isolation.