Abstract

Venezuela Then and Now

The astonishment of a traveller from Venezuela who had been. in this country in 1895 and should return here today, would surely rival that of any assumed visitant from Mars. But now, to Venezuelan eyes, people must seem to have suffered a sea-change. It is a question today, not of a dispute over a boundary line in the swamps and tangled forests of a semi-tropical country, but of very hard cash demanded at the cannon's mouth. The thing which Americans ought to bend their mind to understand, however, is that the temper in which such affairs are handled makes all the difference in the world. Great Britain never proposed to delimit her claimed Venezuelan territory by force; but her war-ships are now insulting American waters by their presence, and, side by side with German cruisers, are preparing to move upon unhappy Venezuela just as if she were Abyssinia or Persia, with no big countrye to protect her.