What form this national development would take was, however, still uncertain, and some great event was obviously required to fix its character.
Blaine's Pan-Americanism had proved insufficient and, though the baiting of Great Britain was welcome to a vociferous minority, the forces making for peace were stronger than those in favor of war.

Whatever differences there were did not reach to fundamentals but were rather in the nature of legal disputes between neighbors whom a real emergency would quickly bring to the assistance of each other.

A crisis involving interest, propinquity, and sentiment, was needed to shake the nation into an activity which would clear its views.
At the very time of the Venezuela difficulty, such a crisis was taking shape in the Caribbean.

Cuba had always been an object of immediate concern to the United States.

The statesmen of the Jeffersonian period all looked to its eventually becoming part of American territory.