Without the United States and its leadership, there can be little doubt that giant semi-sovereign corporations owing allegiance to some great power would now possess these countries.

They would bristle with forts and police, and their populations would be in a state of absolute political and of quasi-economic servitude.

They might today be more orderly and perhaps wealthier, but unless the fundamental American belief in democracy and self-government is wrong they would be infinitely farther from their true goal, which involves the working out of their own civilization.
The Caribbean is but a portion of the whole international problem of the Americas, and the methods used by the United States in solving its problems seemed likely to postpone that sympathetic union of the whole to which it has been looking forward for a century.

Yet this country has not been unappreciative of the larger aspects of Pan-Americanism.
In 1899 President McKinley revived Blaine's project and proposed a Pan-American congress.

To popularize this idea, a Pan-American Exposition was arranged at Buffalo in 1901.