He further proposed that, should Venezuela not pay within three months, the United States should seize the custom houses, collect the money, and pay it to France.

Again his short term prevented him from carrying out his policy, but it is nevertheless of interest as anticipating the plan actually followed by President Roosevelt in the case of Santo Domingo.
Blaine was just as much opposed to the peaceful penetration of European influence in the Western Hemisphere as to its forceful expression.

The project of a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, to be built and owned by a French company, had already aroused President Hayes on March 8, 1880, to remark: "The policy of this country is a canal under American control.

The United States cannot consent to the surrender of this control to any European power or to any combination of European powers." Blaine added that the passage of hostile troops through such a canal when either the United States or Colombia was at war, as the terms of guarantee of the new canal allowed, was "no more admissible than on the railroad lines joining the Atlantic and Pacific shores of the United States." It is characteristic of Blaine that, when he wrote this dispatch, he was apparently in complete ignorance of the existence of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, in which the United States accepted the exactly opposite principles--had agreed to a canal under a joint international guarantee and open to the use of all in time of war as well as of peace.
Discovering this obstacle, he set to work to demolish it by announcing to Great Britain that the treaty was antiquated, thirty years old, that the development of the American Pacific slope had changed conditions, and that, should the treaty be observed and such a canal remain unfortified, the superiority of the British fleet would give the nation complete control.

Great Britain, however, could scarcely be expected to regard a treaty as defunct from old age at thirty years, especially as she also possessed a developing Pacific coast.