Excerpt from Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 7: Issued Bi-Monthly; January, 1896 June, 1896 Lord Salisbury remarked a short time ago, in reply to some Liberal criticism, that he did not make up his foreign policy, he inherited it. Our own Secretaries of State are not so fortunate, for they have inherited, not policies but questions, and most of these are encumbered with estoppels of the past. AS for the American people - they decide these diplo matic questions OH hand, as they come up, by instinct. Or to be more exact, two sets of diplomatic instincts seem to pervade our public mind, and it is only on rare occasions that our decisions are unanimous. On the one hand, our Monroe Doctrine impels us to keep the hand of Europe - or of late, more specifically, the paw of the British lion - OE the entire American Continent; while at the same time, our inherited dread of entangling foreign alliances often makes us hesitate to act when the crucial moment has arrived.a. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.