their lives and happiness against their will and without the consent of their own reason and conscience.
In his message of December 17, 1895, President Cleveland referred to the balance-of-power doctrine as a parallel of the Monroe doctrine. The example was unfortunate if the parallel had been true. What oceans of blood and mountains of treasure have been spent for the balance-of-power doctrine! And what result is there to show for it all? We have had in our history many doctrines: America for the English; no taxation without representation; state rights; separation of purse and sword; manifest destiny; the self-expanding power of the Constitution; God's purpose to civilize the earth by African slavery; and I know not how many others. Some of them are obsolete or forgotten. Others it has cost us frightful sacrifices to set aside. Inasmuch as a United States Senator has referred to the doctrine of Washington's "Farewell Address," that we should avoid entangling alliances with foreign nations, as the "Washington fetish," I may perhaps be allowed to call the Monroe doctrine the "Monroe fetish." We should do best to declare our emancipation from all doctrines, to do our own thinking on all our own questions, and to act according to our own reason and conscience, not according to anybody's traditional formula. There is all the more reason for this because you will observe that the men who are trying to force us to do what they advocate, by shouting "Monroe" at us, all drop the Monroe doctrine as soon as their use of it is proved false in history and by the record—but they do not drop the plans they propose on that account. If, then, they do not abide by Monroe, but only use his name as a club with which to stun us, let us repudiate Monroe at the outset, so that we may stand on an even footing. If I were an educated young man now growing up, I would not
