Page:Americans (1922).djvu/296

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they are also more anxious to secure protected markets, and this can only be achieved by extending the area of political rule. This is the essential significance of the recent change in American foreign policy as illustrated by the Spanish War, the Philippine annexation, the Panama policy, and the new application of the Monroe doctrine to the South American States. South America is needed as a preferential market for investment of trust "profits" and surplus trust products: if in time these States can be brought within a Zollverein under the suzerainty of the United States, the financial area of operations receives a notable accession.

There is an absence of rose-pink altruism from this last explanation which should commend it to The Chicago Tribune; but Roosevelt, though the Tribune's chief hero, would certainly have rejected it for an interpretation at once more personal and more political.

It is fairly plain that this war, which he had done his utmost to prepare for and to bring about, was first of all an opportunity for a man of his strenuous leisure class with fighting blood and fighting edge to win personal distinction. He himself speaks of his baptism of fire as his "crowded hour of glorious life;" and throughout his narrative of the exploits of his regiment—"My men were children of the dragon's blood"—he exhibits a delight in fighting that reminds one of the exuberant praise of "glorious battle" uttered early in the late war by the Colonel of the Death's Head Hussars. He