Within a comparatively few years the United States has become a world power in the broadest sense of that descriptive term. Coordinately with our wonderful internal development have grown our influence and commerce with foreign nations. Although we have been and are overwhelmingly absorbed with the solution of great and grave internal national problems, we have confronted, and are facing, problems of equal importance in our dealings with other nations. We can make no greater error in shaping our present policies with reference to their effect on the future than to disregard the obligations and responsibilities which rest upon us as the most powerful and populous republic of the western hemisphere. When we study, moreover, the various phases of our foreign affairs we find the most interesting and perhaps the most important field of our friendly and commercial influence to be that of the twenty republics to the south of us.