Not very long after the War of 1812, within the space of two administrations, there came another incident, epoch-making in the history of our external policy, and of vital bearing on the navy, in the enunciation of the Monroe doctrine. That pronouncement has been curiously warped at times from its original scope and purpose. In its name have been put forth theories so much at odds with the relations of states, as hitherto understood, that, if they be maintained seriously, it is desirable in the interests of exact definition that their supporters advance some other name for them. It is not necessary to attribute finality to the Monroe doctrine, any more than to any other political dogma, in order to deprecate the application of the phrase to propositions that override or transcend it. We should beware of being misled by names, and especially where such error may induce a popular belief that a foreign state is outraging wilfully a principle to the defence of which the country is committed. We have been committed to the Monroe doctrine itself, not perhaps by any such formal assumption of obligations as cannot be evaded, but by certain precedents, and by a general attitude, upon the whole consistently maintained, from which we cannot recede silently without risk of national mortification. If seriously challenged, as in Mexico by the third Napoleon, we should hardly decline to emulate the sentiments so nobly expressed by the British government, when, in response to the emperors of Russia and France, it declined to abandon the struggling Spanish patriots to the government set over them by Napoleon: "To Spain his Majesty is not bound by any formal instrument; but his Majesty has, in the face of the world, contracted with that nation engagements not less sacred, and not less binding upon his Majesty's mind, than the most solemn treaties." We may have to accept also certain corollaries which may appear naturally to result from the Monroe doctrine, but we are by no means committed to some propositions which lately have been tallied with its name. Those propositions possibly embody a sound policy, more applicable to present conditions than the Monroe doctrine itself, and therefore destined to succeed it; but they are not the same thing. There is, however, something in common between it and them. Reduced to its barest statement, and stripped of all deductions, natural or forced, the Monroe doctrine, if it were not a mere political abstraction, formulated an idea to which in the last resort effect could be given only through the instrumentality of a navy; for the gist of it, the kernel of the truth, was that the country had at that time distant interests on the land, political interests of a high order in the destiny of foreign territory, of which a distinguishing characteristic was that they could be assured only by sea.