INTRODUCTION Within a few months will occur the one hundredth anniversary of the reading of President Monroe's Seventh Annual Message to Congress. The three great Continental Powers to which its warnings were chiefly directed are today prostrate as the result of the World War. Yet the principles it defined have continued to furnish the basis of the foreign policy of the United States. Morever, the eclipse of Russia, Prussia and Austria has but resulted in a renewal of the fundamental problem which confronted the diplomatists and statesmen of the Republic in 1823-a problem which in the words of Monroe regards essentially "the condition of the civilized world and its bearing on us." The international questions which the trained diplomacy of Monroe and Adams was called upon to meet and decide a century ago were similar in a remarkable degree to those of the present day. Again the measure to be arrived at is: How far the conditions of the international situation justify the United States in departing from a system of isolation imposed by geographical conditions and a generally accepted, time-honored policy? How far may we abandon the restraints of this safeguarding principle, and at the earnest solicitation of friendly nations bear a part in agreements intended to maintain the general peace? At such a moment as the present one, to use once more the language of Monroe, "a precise knowledge of our relations with foreign powers as respects our negotiations and transactions with each" is indeed "particularly necessary." The trend of American diplomacy towards a return to the "traditional prejudice" in favor of an American system apart from the affairs of Europe, has offered one of the chief problems confronting the statesmen of the Allied Powers since the close of the War. It is the author's belief that in the light of a renewed study of the events which led to the declarations of the Monroe manifesto, the motives underlying recent policy tend to justify themselves as the continuing result of historical experience. Examination of the archives of the Department of State and documents which have but recently become available in the Imperial Archives of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs prove the similarity of earlier negotiations to those of the present day. Yet the story of the attempts made by the statesmen of Europe to detach the United States from their traditional policy (notably the efforts of the Tsar Idealist, Alexander I, to induce the government in Washington to accede to the pact of the Holy Alliance) forms an almost forgotten chapter of American diplomatic history. A misunderstanding of the policies in opposition to which the Monroe Doctrine was formulated has frequently arisen from a failure to apprehend the nature of the strange pact known as the "Holy Alliance" or to establish its true relation to the series of treaties known as the "System of 1815." The latter formed the basis of the diplomatic reconstruction of Europe after the Napoleonic wars. The "Holy Alliance," or "Holy League," was, in its inception, an expression of the highly idealistic personal policy of a single powerful sovereign, the Tsar Alexander I of Russia. Of its three signers the Tsar, and the Tsar alone, affixed his seal without mental reservations concerning the principles it invoked. The System of 1815 resulted from a long series of debated agreements, beginning with the politico-military pacts of Toeplitz, Reichenbach and Chaumont, continued by the two Treaties of Paris and the Acts of the Congress of Vienna. The Tsar's "League of Peace" was suddenly imposed upon his allies at a time when the prestige of his military power was essential to their cause; when to do otherwise than humor his doctrinaire theories of international solidarity might have resulted in a serious breach in the ranks of the Grand Alliance. In the perspective of history, the internationalist aspirations and purposes of the Russian autocrat may be viewed in their true sense and value. His contemporaries, however, may well be pardoned for considering his policies as contradictory and irreconcilable. Metternich and the reactionary statesmen of his school saw in Alexander a dangerous dreamer, a "crowned Jacobin" at almost the same time that Canning and Monroe were uniting the policies of the "Constitutional Powers" to protect the principles of free government from the interventions he set on foot in the interests of monarchical legitimacy ab antiquo. But in order to understand the Tsar's conception of his own diplomacy, a brief biographical study of the varied personal influences and relation ships which accompanied the changing phases of his political beliefs becomes essential. Alexander was born in St. Petersburg on December 12, 1777. His celebrated grandmother, the Empress Catherine, undertook the entire direction of his early education, to the exclusion of his father, the morose and unpopular Tsarevitch Paul. With his brother, the Grand Duke Constantine, his studies were regulated by an elaborate plan, drawn up by the great Tsarina herself after a long correspondence with the philosophers Grimm and Diderot in Paris. It seems to have been the deliberate intention of this remarkable woman to make the young heir of the Romanovs-if not a prodigy of learning 1—at least a well educated man, an attainment far above the level of the court circles surrounding him! That this intention was even in a measure carried out was largely due to her fortunate choice of a tutor for the little princes in the person of a French Swiss scholar, Frederick Cesar Laharpe, whom she found was occupying a subordinate position in the household of a brother of the reigning favorite, Count Landskoi.2 Laharpe was at this time thirty years old. He was an avowed republican, strongly influenced by Voltaire in his youth, and later an enthusiastic disciple of Rousseau. Strangely enough, none of these qualities were likely at this time to injure his prestige in the eyes of the autocratic Catherine. When, at a later date, the excesses of the French Revolution had disillusioned the Empress, her fashionable approval of liberalism (which she shared with the aristocratic salons of Paris) changed to a violent hatred of all that recalled the doctrines of Jacobinism. Until 1789, however, she saw no contradiction in choosing, for the important position of tutor to the heir of the absolute Tsars, a man of Laharpe's ultra-liberal convictions.3 From the beginning of their intimate relationship, the young master and his pupils appear to have been charmed with each 1 Rain, Un Tsar idéalogue Alexandre Ier, pp. 7 et seq. 'For a vivid picture of the dissolute court which surrounded the youth of Alexander, notably the régime of Catherine's ignoble "favorites," see The Diaries and Correspondence of the Earl of Malmesbury. Rain, op. cit., pp. 16-19. Laharpe must not be confused with the critic Jean Francois de Le Harpe (1739–1803), whose Correspondence with the Grand Duke of Russia, now Emperor (the Emperor Paul), was published in five tedious volumes in 1801. This work, generally concerned with the petty jealousies of the French literary world, was probably addressed to Paul in a spirit of pure snobisme. |