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contradictions only after a careful reading. For example, John Speed's confident statement of "England's Election" in his Historie of Great Britaine (1611) seems easily explicable by the changed political context of English Protestantism. Under a king of Great Britain with pretensions to be the arbiter of Europe, Speed seemed to refurbish England's Protestant pedigree to justify the nation's manifest destiny. The Historie also appears to fit the new ecclesiastical context. Where earlier Protestant historians had seen the church as the elect scat

A frontier woman in early Maine journeys home after tending a sick friend. Setting out at dusk, she is surprised by the ghostly vision of a "winding-sheet" and the sound of a "spectral and melancholy voice." Three times the voice cries, "The Lord have mercy on the people!" Hurrying on, the woman refuses to let herself be unsettled by such "fancies and chimeras." But as she enters the woods, she is attacked by an animal called the "Indian Devil" and is swept as its prey into a tree. Through the long night, the heroine prolongs her life by singing to the beast. At dawn she is rescued by her husband. Just as the husband has rescued his wife, however, so has the wife saved her husband and child. In their absence, their small settlement has been attacked by the Indians and, like Adam and Eve at the end of Paradise Lost, the members of this small family find themselves standing alone, facing an unknown future. "The world was all before them, where to choose" (Spofford, "Circumstance" 85, 96). (1) This, briefly summarized, is the plot of Harriet Prescott Spofford's remarkable story, "circumstance." First published in 1860 in the Atlantic Monthly, the story was based on an event in the life of Spofford's maternal great-grandmother, Mrs. Josiah Hitchings. Only the bare outlines of Mrs. Hitchings's experience appear to have been preserved by family legend. (2) But Spofford had no difficulty re-creating the experience with the kind of lavish poetic detail that had become the trademark of her early fiction. She not only describes the harrowing circumstances that beset the heroine throughout her night in the forest, but also dramatizes the inner workings of the heroine's consciousness as she moves from her fear of a horrific death by mutilation to a transforming experience of evangelical Christian renewal. Spofford specifically grounds the heroine's religious experience in the singing of Methodist hymns, based largely on scripture, and in the memory of her first communion. (3) She also reveals that the ecst atic spiritual experience that results from the singing of hymns has prepared her heroine for a future that, as the passage from Milton suggests, is as limitless as the uncharted wilderness. Although "Circumstance" depicts the liberating potential of Christian revelation for a white woman on the frontier, the heroine's self-renewal nonetheless is deeply compromised. Her spiritually reconstituted identity and the promise of her family's future depend upon the demonizing of native American people and the rhetoric, however indirect or subdued, of manifest destiny. The end of the story, in fact, expresses an imperialistic vision of the land stretched out "all before" the young family and a confidence in the extension of empire that, in the American nationalist project, was constructed in part upon the Christian ideology of the new nation. "GRAND AND SWEET METHODIST HYMNS" No sooner has the heroine of "Circumstance" been attacked by the "Indian Devil" (or panther) than she begins to experience an ordeal both physical and mental. Held in the clutches of a wild animal, facing death by mutilation, she remains highly conscious of her fate: "Let us be ended by fire," she thinks, "and we are ashes, for the winds to bear, the leaves to cover; let us be ended by wild beasts, and the base, cursed thing howls with us forever through the forest" (89). In part, the woman feels a disgust for the "strength of our lower natures let loose" or the animalistic dimension of human nature of which the beast reminds her (89). But she does not struggle explicitly with her own "lower nature," as Anne Dalke suggests (76). She is overtaken instead by a fear similar to that faced by many American women who made journeys into the wilderness--the fear of turning savage and becoming wild themselves. The capacity to go "wild," it was thought, existed just below the surface of civilized existence; it would no t take much for a civilized, Christian woman to descend to the level of an animal or a savage. …

Rule of Power or Rule of Law? assesses U.S. compliance with nine treaties addressing some of the most urgent global security threats, ranging from proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to global climate change. The study documents the value of those treaties, but concludes that the United States, in an echo of the nineteenth century idea of Manifest Destiny, is undermining each of them, preferring instead to set itself above the law and relying mainly on its own military and economic might.

This article seeks to delineate the influence of spiritualism and Swedenborgianism on the work of Hiram Powers. In examining how these faiths guided his response to dreams, visions, premonitions, Mesmerism, folk customs, and childhood experiences, we come to realize that Powers's statues were more immediately engaged in the current issues of American culture than hitherto realized. This is especially true of his California (1850–57), in which he attempted to express doctrines associated with American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny in terms of ideals associated with the vitalistic religions the artist had embraced.

'Bettelyoun's stories raise important questions about other cultures and particularly oral cultures: whose voice is heard, whose truth counts, and what is true and false about the history of the American West...Bettelyoun's stories allow readers to hear the voice of a person moving back and forth between several cultures and truths. An important addition to history' - "Choice". 'An unmatched perspective on the struggle of the Lakota against the white tide of Manifest Destiny' - "News from Indian Country". 'This book is quite unusual in being a firsthand account of 19th-century Sioux life by a woman. It is also a very readable and fascinating account of a key period in Plains Indian life' - "Library Journal"."With My Own Eyes" tells the history of the nineteenth-century Lakotas. Susan Bordeaux Bettelyoun (1857-1945), the daughter of a French-American fur trader and a Brule Lakota woman, was raised near Fort Laramie and experienced firsthand the often devastating changes forced on the Lakotas. As Bettelyoun grew older, she became increasingly dissatisfied with the way her people's history was being represented by non-Natives. "With My Own Eyes" represents her attempt to correct misconceptions about Lakota history. Bettelyoun's narrative was recorded during the 1930s by another Lakota historian, Josephine Waggoner. This detailed, insightful account of Lakota history was never previously published. Emily Levine is a longtime landscaper in Lincoln, Nebraska.

N ative American people speak of walking in two worlds. For the most part this entails dealing with people who walk in only one world, a world that takes for granted the English language, the Christian religion, land as a commodity to be bought and sold, and individual property ownership. In the American West there are numerous small towns on or near reservations where two-world and one-world people coexist. What do they think of each other, how do they interact? Are these, in any sense, two-world towns? As tribes engage with the federal government and other entities at the official level, relationships at the personal level make a difference. They are incomplete, however, without the cultural framework in which they occur. It was once thought that increased contact between racial/cultural groups would ameliorate prejudice and discrimination.1 This idea has since been refined to specify contact in a conA text of equal opportunity. Equal opportunity to do what? Usually, to ? "achieve" the qualities and conditions of the dominant group, that is, to assimilate. Is there such a thing as equal opportunity to differ yet stand 3 147 together? We might hope that proximity in a small-town setting would open a window to a second world for Euramericans. Does it? Are these small towns a resource in support of treaty rights or a hindrance? The Euramerican, one-world people have claimed no less than a "manifest destiny to overspread the continent."2 One of the indigenous nations that were "overspread" in the process are the Nee-Me-Poo, also

John Tyler rarely has been credited, either by contemporary observers or later historians, for having a vision of national destiny. Although he served as president during the "manifest destiny" decade of the 1840s, or what more recently has been characterized by one historian as an era of "manifest design," Tyler routinely has been dismissed as a narrow states' rights stalwart who, when president in the early 1840s, pursued continental expansion solely, as in the case of Texas, to preserve the institution of slavery.1 His perceived prosouthern role in the peace conference of 186061, his decision to support secession after peace negotiations failed, and his subsequent election to the House of Representatives in the first Confederate Congress, indelibly etched in the American public's mind an image of John Tyler as a stereotypical aristocratic southern slaveowner who, in defense of his region's "peculiar institu-tion," championed states' rights, secession, and the break-up of the Union. Perhaps the individual who more than any other was responsible for creating this perception of Tyler was his son Lyon G. Tyler. In his three volume work, The Letters and Times of the Tylers, published in the 1880s, he interpreted his father's career through the lens of the Civil War, consciously cultivating an image of John Tyler as a gracious, noble, and honorable southern patriot. Years later, in a pamphlet published in 1929 that gained some notoriety, he compared his father to Abraham Lincoln

T hese three richly suggestive essays give strong and hopeful promise that future studies of Russian imperialism will be informed as much by culture as by diplomatic and military history. By their substance and eloquence they challenge the traditional reliance on geopolitics as the dominant explanatory model of Russian foreign policy. At the very least they contribute to the modest body of scholarly literature that proposes "geoculture" as an alternative way of analyzing the dramatic expansion and the no less dramatic contraction of the Russian state over the past five centuries. In addition, they explore and contrast two dimensions of imperialism, the universalistor European-and the particularist-or Russian. Finally, they remind us of the importance of making analytical distinctions between the self-perception of the imperialists and the critical perception of the scholar. The overall effect, subtle but compelling, is to question once again the hoary dualism of Westernizer and Slavophile as a useful intellectual framework in which to compose cultural history. In every modern state imperialism shares a commonality of motives: the search for markets and raw materials, the assumption of greator world-power status, the consolidation of real or imagined security interests and the fulfillment of a national mission. But in each case the definition of the national mission must differ, reflecting the peculiarities of the dominant culture of the metropolitan center. Manifest destiny, the white man's burden, la mission civilisatrice, the contest between Kultur and Zivilization-yes, and even the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere-were so many forms of shorthand, slogans, to legitimize continental and overseas expansion, simplified like all shorthand, but capturing essentials of the real phenomenon. Russia lacked a popular and catchy phrase to capture the essence of its imperialism. Pushkin's narodnost' might have worked if the term had not been expropriated and vulgarized by Uvarov and Nicholas I. But this absence of a defining term should not blind us, as these essays demonstrate, to the complex cultural traits that informed Russian expansion. Modern Russian imperialism was no more or less particularist than that of the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany or Japan. It was cast in a different cultural mold; the problem is to explain the difference.

For decades, the story of the American West has been told as a glorious tale of conquest and rugged individualism--the triumph of progress. But recently, a new school of historians has challenged this view, creating what is known as the "new western history," an approach that gives a central role to the environment, native peoples, and the concentration of power in the hands of a few. Foremost among these historians is Donald Worster. In Worster's writings, the western past emerges not as a march of Manifest Destiny but rather as an unfolding relationship between humankind and nature. In Under Western Skies, Worster provides an eloquent introduction to the changing traditions of western historical writing and then demonstrates his own approach through fascinating case studies. For example, he takes a hard look at the struggle by the Lakota to regain ownership of the Black Hills, examining not only the legal history of treaties and court cases but also the importance of the Black Hills in Indian religion and the way they have been mismanaged by the U.S. government. He discusses the cowboy in terms of the new ecology that arose from livestock ranching--the endless miles of fences, the changes in the environment wrought by extensive grazing, certain species of animals almost wiped out because they were considered a danger to sheep and cattle. But Worster's view of nature is not as simple or as, linear as for instance, Bill McKibben's stark picture in The End of Nature, a picture Worster argues against. From the mining ghost towns of the Rockies to the uprooted farm families of the Dust Bowl, nature sometimes wins the struggle. Even the Hoover Dam, he reminds us, may one day be overcome by the patient Colorado River. Under Western Skies both offers intriguing insights into important aspects of our history and instills a new appreciation for the place of nature, native peoples, and the struggles over money and power in the western past.

"My grandparents didn't get special language instruction in school. In fact, they never finished high school because they had to work for a living." Latinos hear this and similar statements every time the question of bilingual education comes up. Such statements highlight an important difference the maintenance of another language and the development of interlingual forms-between this "new" immigrant group and the "older," "ethnic" immigrants. The fact is that Latinos, that very heterogeneous medley of races, classes and nationalities' are different from both the "older" and the "new" ethnics.2 To begin with, Latinos do not comprise even a relatively homogeneous "ethnicity." Latinos include native-born U.S. citizens (predominantly Chicanos Mexican-Americans and Nuyoricans "mainland" Puerto Ricans) and Latin American immigrants of all racial and national combinations: white including a range of different European nationalities Native-American, black, Arabic, and Asian. It is thus a mistake to lump them all under the category "racial minority,"3 although historically the U.S. experiences of large numbers of Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans are adequately described by this concept.4 Moreover, both of these groups unlike any of the European immigrant groups constitute, with Native-Americans, "conquered minorities."' If not outright conquered peoples, other Latin American immigrants, heretofore inhabitants of the "backyard" over which the United States claims the right of manifest destiny, have migrated here for both political and economic reasons, in part because of U.S. intervention in their homelands. From the time of Jose Martf, who lived in New York for over one third of his life during the 1880s and 1890s, slowly establishing the foundations for the Cuban independence movement, to the 1980s sanctuary movement for Central American refugees, U.S. actions (military incursions as well as economic sanctions) in Latin America have always generated Latin American migrations. The policies of U.S. finance institutions (supported by the U.S. government and, at times, by its military), moreover, have brought enormous foreign debt to Latin America and with it intolerable austerity programs that have induced many to seek a living in the United States.6

THE LOSS of the frontier, announced by the superintendent of the census in I890, haunted the imagination of many during the following decade, a period which has come to represent a Great Divide in American culture. The images which its passing evokedthe victimized yeoman, the virile hunter, the rugged individualistbecame manifest in a number of related ways: in the final desperation of Western Populism, in the campaign posture of Teddy Roosevelt, and in a new historiography of American uniqueness. As a crucial and representative national experience, the loss of the frontier was of the greatest imaginative import to one of the period's major new writers, Frank Norris, who began to write as the decade opened and died soon after its close. Norris suffered to a rather extreme degree the American ordeal of the youth who feels his artistic aspirations are at odds with the virility and practicality his culture demands. But he was determinedly American, determinedly optimistic in his search for a culturally significant subject he might celebrate. Hence the frontier is a recurrent subject of the often confused formulations Norris set forth in his critical essays, posthumously collected as Responsibilities of the Novelist. The glorious past of the Anglo-Saxon in his great march from Frisian marshes to California sea cliffs fascinated him, and the providential future of new Hengists and Horsas shimmered before him in the race's manifest destiny of commercial conquest. But the present confused him. Temperamentally driven to feel himself a man of the world, a virile poet and acknowledged legislator of his people, he lamented his era as one of "instability and changeableness' of fads and falsity. In the metaphors he employed, the artist was a mounted knight in the van, a captain of vast enterprise, an explorer on a national quest, a prophet crying unto the Lord, a novelist of the people. "You must lead! " he warned beginning writers.' But permanence and ideality were not easy to discover amid the complexities of changing America. In his essays Norris groped for the locus of reality. It lay

Modernists who claim to be avant-garde have often situated art in a combat role against society and tradition. Many contemporary artists, however, believe that society is interested not only in preserving its artistic inheritance but also in encouraging artistic activity. After all, look at all the public monuments today and the remarkable interest and supportive activity of government. Society expects its artists to contribute to the formation of a new generation of artists through a relation of mentor and protege.

THE PURITANS INVENTED THE SACRED HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND; THE eighteenth-century clergy established the concept of America's mission. In this essay I want to suggest the nature of that development, with special emphasis on the role of the Edwardsean revivals. I use the word suggest to stress the limits of my subject. My perspective is a very partial one: partial in its view of Edwards, of Puritanism, of the Great Awakening, and above all, of the social and ideological factors that carried the colonies from revival to revolution. I try to indicate something of the "larger picture" in the course of my analysis, but mainly I focus on questions of rhetoric. My assumption is that (after due allowance is made for all the complexities involved) American culture may be said to have grown in a more or less coherent way toward a modern free enterprise economy, that that growth finds expression in the quasi-figural outlook we have come to associate with manifest destiny and the dream, and therefore that to describe that outlook is (by implication at least) to illuminate some of the controversial connections between Puritan, Yankee, and Revolutionary America. The connections have been controversial for many reasons. In the interests of clarity, I center my discussion on the rhetoric of millennialism, and specifically Edwardsean "post-millennialism": first, in its relation to New England Puritanism; and second, in its relation to what has recently been termed "civil millennialism." In both cases, historians have emphasized a radical shift in approach. Without denying the fact of change, I hope to demonstrate the ways in which the persistence of language and vision constitutes an underlying unity of design. I need hardly add that to demonstrate is not the same as to endorse.

"John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it," is one of many aphorisms attributed to Andrew Jackson. The particu lar utterance was characteristic of Jackson's attitude toward the Supreme Court of the United States whenever it, or Congress, pre sumed to lay restraints upon the "imperial Presidency."1 The words also reflected Jackson's attitude toward Indian rights as they amounted to restraints upon his notions of manifest destiny. "Old Hickory's" comment was provoked by the opinion of Chief Justice Marshall in Worcester v. Georgia,2 the 1832 case which might have reopened the door that Cherokee Nation v. Georgia? had closed the year before, when Indian tribes sought to find a judicial remedy for unending encroachments upon their lands and steady compromis ing of their treaty rights. Georgia land hunger had already indirectly involved that state in the 1810 case of Fletcher v. Peck,41 an impairment-of-contract issue growing out of the notorious Yazoo land frauds on the banks of the Mississippi.5 The Indian interest had been substantially compro mised in the 1823 case of Johnson v. Mclntosh,6 when the Supreme Court, speaking through Marshall, ruled that the native Americans were not the original lords of the fee, or even tenants in fee. If the ruling in Cherokee Nation was thus foreshadowed, the unequivocal ruling against Georgia in Worcester could only be answered (as it was) by outright defiance of the Supreme Court by the state. The impunity with which Georgia could do so was reflected in Jackson's aphorism; a President who would not tolerate South Carolina's at tempted nullification of the tariff did not intend to apply the same principle of federal supremacy to Indian land grabbing by another state. Yet, as the irony of political events would have it, the ultimate triumph of the constitutional principle in Worcester, as against Cherokee Nation, meant the ultimate self-destruction of the nulli fication doctrine?but did not, in the process, restore the Cherokees' rights. The Cherokee interests litigated in 1831 and 1832 ultimately fell victim to both political and judicial confrontations, their sacrifice being the price of saving Marshall's constitutional doctrine from

TN I884 Mark Twain was not only seeing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through the press but also completing another novel, one set in Hawaii and based on what he had learned during and after his i866 visit to the Islands. Extant fragments and his own comments about the never-published work show that Twain saw it as a complex and somehow troubling project combining the idyllic, the heroic, and the tragic in ways that contradicted the simplistic conventions of a Hawaiian paradise that by Twain's time were already evident in advertisements for tourism. Not having survived and almost never noticed in the century since he wrote it, Twain's Hawaii novel cannot be said to have influenced the course of American literary traditions concerning Hawaii and the Pacific. But however obliquely and humorously he addressed certain issues in his writings about "the loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean, vestiges of the novel suggest that in it, Twain brought to a peak his serious thoughts about Hawaii, sitting as the Kingdom was in the path of America's Manifest Destiny. Thanks mainly to Roughing It (I872), even casual readers of Twain know that early in his writing career he visited and wrote about Hawaii. Yet while he satirized certain popular views of Hawaii, Hawaiians, and their place in the Western imagination, his remarks have typically been taken, even by scholars, as endorsements of the paradise image the Hawaii tourist industry has promoted.1 Contrary to its apparent breeziness, Twain's total

Study of Walden would perhaps not have become such an obsession with me had it not presented itself as a response to questions with which I was already obsessed: Why has America never expressed itself philosophically? Or has it-in the metaphysical riot of its greatest literature? Has the impulse to philosophical speculation been absorbed, or exhausted, by speculation in territory, as in such thoughts as Manifest Destiny? Or are such questions not really intelligible? They are, at any rate, disturbingly like the questions that were asked about American literature before it established itself. In rereading Walden, twenty years after first reading it, I seemed to find a book of sufficient intellectual scope and consistency to have established or inspired a tradition of thinking.

Yellow Wolf, a Cheyenne chief, in the early 1830's, pointed out to the Bent brothers and Ceran St. Vrain the most advantageous location for their permanent trading post. In a sense, he opened his robes and those of his brothers of the southern plains to the teeth of progress, on manifest destiny. Some thirty years later, the Wolf was thanked generously when the troops of John M. Chivington fired upon his village and left the old chief dead on the banks of Sand Creek.

T HE DECADE OF THE 1890s was for most Americans a period of tension, uncertainty, and polarization. As hard times wracked the nation in the wake of the Panic of 1893, urban workers and impoverished farmers proposed a host of procedural and substantive reforms which challenged existing political and economic relationships. Conservatives, alarmed by the rising tide of populism, particularly its demand for free silver, and by labor agitation, vigorously defended the status quo. Meanwhile, the political extremism and economic distress of the era, highlighted by such violent encounters as the Homestead and Pullman strikes, caused the "silent majority" to question the efficacy of traditional institutions and the validity of the American creed. Deeply troubled, many turned to foreign affairs for diversion and reassurance, and subsequently embraced the New Manifest Destiny both as a source and a symbol of national unity.' One group that felt particularly threatened by domestic developments in the United States at the turn of the century were black Americans, and they no less than the white majority displayed an intense interest in the nation's changing role in world affairs. Black journalists exhibited a wide range of opinion toward American expansion, but their frame of reference was substantially different from that of whites. Whether imperialists of pacifists, nationalists or internationalists, black observers explicitly judged diplomatic developments on the basis of their anticipated impact on the plight of Negro Americans. Nowhere was this better illustrated than by an incident which occurred in 1895. In that year the United States and France became involved in a complicated and at times bitter diplomatic dispute concerning the arrest and imprisonment of one John L. Waller, a black American who dared to challenge French imperialism in the east African island of Madagascar. The black press, perhaps at the height of its power and influence in the 1890s, reacted vigorously to Waller and his goals, to French treatment of him and the Malagasys, and to the Cleveland ad

With the purchase of Alaska in 1867, America faced a situation with which it had hitherto been unfamiliar. It assumed the responsibility for the government of peoples unlike in race, culture, habits of life and manner of conducting economic affairs those which prevailed in the territory occupied by the United States. The acquisition of new territories was not, to be sure, an unfamiliar experience on the part of the American people. By treaties, purchase, and conquest, the United States had extended its territory from a narrow strip on the Atlantic all the way to the Pacific shore. Earlier acquisitions, however, were undertaken for purposes different from those which figured in the acquisition of the areas which constitute the present Territories and Outlying Possessions of the United States. The area covered by the Louisiana Purchase, and the territory wrested from Mexico were acquired under the impulse of the manifest destiny of the American nation-to make the North American continent, or as much of it as could be acquired, the home of the American people. Previous acquisitions constituted an organic growth of the American nation. Newly acquired territories were to be incorporated into sovereign states as soon as that was feasible.

IT IS NECESSARY only to set down the title of this article, inevitably inviting comparison with Bisson's America's Far Eastern Policy' and Moore's Soviet Far Eastern Policy.2 to realize that Canada cannot properly be said to have a positive Far Eastern policy. This is not surprising, since the Canadian people and government have had other preoccupations in their task of creating a civilized community in the harsh northern half of North America. Their relations with the Pacific have been relatively few and tenuous. Yet not only has the twentieth century enabled Canada to develop the material structure of its civilization to near-maturity; the great wars of the century have enormously accelerated that development and forced a somewhat unprepared Canada to participate in world affairs. In consequence a Canadian Far Eastern policy must develop, and is, indeed, in the process of doing so. To understand present developments in Canadian policy in the Far East, one must keep in mind certain fundamentals of Canadian external policy which arise out of the history of the country and the present composition and interests of its people. In contrast with that of the United States, the history of Canada is distinguished by its traditional orientation towards Europe. Even the French-Canadian community, whose political ties with Europe were forcibly broken, has maintained religious and, to a lesser degree, cultural ties with Europe which may increasingly affect Canadian external policy. Of this European orientation the colonial bond was only one manifestation. The orientation arose, too, out of the nature of the Canadian economy, whose great export staples usually found their principal markets in Europe and, especially, the British Isles. The pattern was set in the colonial period by the conservative and counter-revolutionary character of the early Canadian immigrants, by fear of absorption by the United States in the era of Manifest Destiny, and by continued

R OBERT A. NAYLORP's article entitled "The British Role in Central America Prior to the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850,' sets forth a sweeping thesis of commercial determinism which demands careful scrutiny before being accepted. Mr. Naylor declares that British policies in mid-America before 1850 "were determined not by political considerations but rather by commercial interests, and to a considerable degree were formulated by British inerchants in Central America, Belize, and Great Britain rather than by functionaries in the Foreign Office. '2 It is to be noted that this rather narrow thesis expressly rules out political and strategic factors in British policy formulation. Few historians today would wish to deny the great importance of trade considerations to the British in the first half of the nineteenth century. But to say that commercial interests determined the policies of the London Foreign Office is quite another matter. Such an interpretation, on the one hand, tends to obscure the fundamental inseparability of economic, political, and strategic matters, while on the other it implies that British policy makers were peculiarly insensitive and unresponsive to the major strategic forces that led directly to the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty. It would be strange indeed to learn that functionaries of the Foreign Office failed to give heed to non-commercial factors in Central America during the turbulent years that preceded the negotiation of the controversial treaty of 1850. Is it possible that the shattering defeat of Mexico by the United States, the increasing Yankee interest in Central America, and the serious talk of a trans-isthmian canal route of these years could have been ignored by British officials because they were preoccupied with the returns of trade? If the strategic threat of Manifest Destiny went unnoticed by the British in Central America, then we may conclude that the policy makers of that nation were unaccountably negligent.

There is definitely a crisis, perhaps something worse before this article begins to gather dust on a library shelf. There is also a Western Hemisphere even though its eastern limits seem to be expanding almost as rapidly as they did in the era of Manifest Destiny. Democracy, on the other hand, is neither definite nor expanding. How, indeed, when we consider the history of the Western Hemisphere,' can there be any functional democracy? By functional democracy I mean a system of government and a way of life that definitely promote the opportunity for every one to develop and utilize to the best good of all

IDEOLOGY is the means by which a nation bridges the gap between its domestic achievement and its international aspiration. American continentalism, as the term is used here, provided just such an order of ideology and national values. It consisted of two related ideas. First, it regarded the United States as possessing identical "national and imperial boundaries." These were located within the physical framework of a "remarkably coherent geographic unit of continental extent." Second, it viewed much of North America as a stage displaying the evolving drama of a unique political society, distinct from that of Europe and glowing in the white light of manifest destiny.' This attitude sharpened the practice of American foreign policy. Encountering the opposition of Europe's powers, it asserted that the United States was engaged in a domestic and therefore inevitable policy of territorial extension across the continent. American diplomacy in the nineteenth century thus appeared to demonstrate national political and social worth rather than acknowledge its active involvement in international affairs. Relying on its separation from the Old World, the United States redefined the conventional terms of foreign relations by domesticating its foreign policy. But sharp and immediate disengagements in history are rare. Professor Norman Graebner has argued persuasively that the acquisition of Oregon and California-conventionally set within the background of territorial expansion to the west and guaranteed by manifest destiny-was due predominantly to martime influence and executed by a President whose party repre