The exception is important, as we shall see presently; but it does not concern the domestic institutions of the European and the American states.

The emancipated and nationalized European states of to-day, so far from being essentially antagonistic to the American democratic nation, are constantly tending towards a condition which invites closer and more fruitful association with the United States; and any national doctrine which proclaims a rooted antagonism lies almost at right angles athwart the road of American democratic national achievement.

Throughout the whole of the nineteenth century the European nations have been working towards democracy by means of a completer national organization; while this country has been working towards national cohesion by the mere logic and force of its democratic ideal.
Thus the distance between America and Europe is being diminished; and Americans in their individual behavior bear the most abundant and generous testimony to the benefits which American democracy can derive from association with the European nations.

It is only in relation to the Monroe Doctrine that we still make much of the essential incompatibility between European and American institutions, and by so doing we distort and misinterpret the valid meaning of a national democratic foreign policy.

The existing domestic institutions of the European nations are for the most part irrelevant to such a policy.
The one way in which the foreign policy of the United States can make for democracy is by strengthening and encouraging those political forces which make for international peace.