A decent guarantee of international peace would be precisely the political condition which would enable the European nations to release the springs of democracy; and the Americanism which was indifferent or suspicious of the spread of democracy in Europe would incur and deserve the enmity of the European peoples.

Such an attitude would constitute a species of continental provincialism and chauvinism.
Hence there is no shibboleth that patriotic Americans should fight more tenaciously and more fiercely than of America for the Americans, and Europe for the Europeans.

To make Pan-Americanism merely a matter of geography is to deprive it of all serious meaning.

Pan-Slavism or Pan-Germanism, based upon a racial bond, would be a far more significant political idea.

The only possible foundation of Pan-Americanism is an ideal democratic purpose--which, when translated into terms of international relations, demands, in the first place, the establishment of a pacific system of public law in the two Americas, and in the second place, an alliance with the pacific European Powers, just in so far as a similar system has become in that continent one of the possibilities of practical politics..