Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship. If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere, the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power. About the same time Minister Dawson was directed by Secretary Hay to suggest to the Dominican government that it request the United States to take charge of its customs. As the Dominican government saw no other way out of its difficulties, it responded to this suggestion, and on February 4, 1905, a protocol was signed by Mr. Dawson and the Dominican foreign minister which provided that the United States should guarantee the territorial integrity of the Dominican Republic, take charge of its custom-houses, administer its finances, and settle its obligations, foreign as well as domestic. In calling the new agreement a "protocol" instead of a "treaty," the President had probably not intended to submit it to the Senate, but the proposal to depart so radically from our past policy created so much criticism that the Senate was finally asked to ratify the protocol in regular form. This they failed to do, but the President did not propose to be thwarted in this way. As the Senate would not sanction his appointment of a receiver of customs for Santo Domingo, he drafted a _modus vivendi_, under the terms of which the President of the Dominican Republic appointed a receiver of customs named unofficially by President Roosevelt, who proceeded to administer the affairs of the republic under the protection of the United States navy, whose ships the President could as commander-in-chief order wherever he pleased. The President's course met with determined opposition both in and out of Congress, but as he was bent on having his way and continued to carry out his policy without the sanction of the Senate, that body finally decided that it would be best to give the arrangement a definite legal status. On February 25, 1907, the Senate agreed to the ratification of a revised treaty which omitted the territorial-guarantee clause, but provided that the President of the United States should appoint a general receiver of Dominican customs and such assistants as he might deem necessary; that the government of the United States should afford them such protection as might be necessary for the performance of their duties; and that until the bonded debt