complete local autonomy. Its formal transition from dependence to
independence consisted chiefly in expelling the British governor of the
colony and electing a governor of the State, from which to the organized
Union was but a step. All these conditions of success were wanting in
Spanish America, and hence many of the difficulties in their career
as independent states; and, further, while the revolution in British
America was the exclusive result of the march of opinion in the British
colonies, the simultaneous action of the separate Spanish colonies,
though showing a desire for independence, was principally produced by
the accident of the invasion of Spain by France.

The formation of these new sovereignties in America was important to us,
not only because of the cessation of colonial monopolies to that extent,
but because of the geographical relations to us held by so many new
nations, all, like ourselves, created from European stock and interested
in excluding European politics, dynastic questions, and balances of
power from further influence in the New World.

Thus the United States were forced into new lines of action, which,
though apparently in some respects conflicting, were really in harmony
with the line marked out by Washington. The avoidance of entangling
political alliances and the maintenance of our own independent
neutrality became doubly important from the fact that they became
applicable to the new Republics as well as to the mother country.
The duty of noninterference had been admitted by every President.
The question came up in the time of the first Adams, on the occasion
of the enlistment projects of Miranda. It appeared again under Jefferson
(anterior to the revolt of the Spanish colonies) in the schemes of Aaron
Burr. It was an ever-present question in the Administrations of Madison,
Monroe, and the younger Adams, in reference to the questions of foreign