be made entirely independent of all foreign control, and of every form of imperial or despotic power—the sooner the better. Universally imbued with this lofty and magnanimous sentiment, the people of the United States have opened their broad territories from ocean to ocean, and from the lakes to the gulf, freely to the downtrodden and oppressed of all nations, as a republican asylum. In their Constitution they have written with equal unanimity and zeal, the declaration that to all who shall come within that asylum they guarantee that they shall be forever governed only by republican institutions. This noble guarantee extends in spirit, in policy, and in effect to all other nations in the American Hemisphere, so far as may depend on moral influences, which in the cause of political truth are always more effective than arms. Some of those nations are communities near the United States, which, while they are animated like the American people, with a desire for republican institutions, and will not willingly submit to any other, are yet by reason of insufficient territory, imperfect development, colonial demoralization, or other causes, incapable of independently sustaining them. To these, as in the case of the ancient Louisiana, Florida, Alaska, St. Domingo and St. Thomas, the people of the United States offer incorporation into the United States, with their own free consent, without conquest, and when they are fully prepared for that important change. Other nations on the continent, liberally endowed with the elements and virtues of national independence, prosperity, and aggrandizement, more matured and self-reliant, cherishing the same enlightened and intense desire for republican institutions, have nobly assumed the position and exercised the powers of exclusive sovereignty. Of this class are Mexico—older as a nation, but newer as a republic than the United States—Venezuela, and Colombia, the Central American States, Peru, the Argentine Republic, and Chili. These republics have thus become, and are gladly recognized by the people of the United States with all their just claims and pretentions of separate sovereignty, fraternal republics and political allies. To the people of the United States the universal acceptance of
