"England responded, in a second note, that the clear obligation of the United States under the treaty was to keep the canal open to the citizens and subjects of the United States and Great Britain on equal terms, and to allow the ships of all nations to use it on terms of entire equality. It also contended that the United States is embraced in this term of 'all nations'; that the British Government would scarcely have entered into the Hay-Pauncefote treaty, if it had understood that England was to be denied the equal use of the Panama Canal with America. The three objections urged by the British against the American canal law were: That it gives the President the right to discriminate against foreign shipping; that it exempts coastwise traffic from paying tolls; and that it gives the Government-owned vessels of the Republic of Panama the right to use the canal free. The answer of the United States to the first of these objections was that the right of the President to fix tolls in a way that would be discriminatory against British shipping was a question that could only be considered when the President had done so.

"The British Government expressed the fear that the United States, in remitting tolls on coastwise business, would assess the entire charges of maintenance of the canal upon the vessels of foreign trade, and thus cause them to bear an unequal burden. This, the second objection, was answered with the statement that, whereas the treaty gives the United States the right to levy charges sufficient to meet the interest of the capital expended, and the cost of maintaining and operating the canal, the early years of its operation will be at a loss and, therefore, at a lower rate than Great Britain could ask under the treaty. The third objection was considered insignificant.

"The British Government, after laying down its objec

tions to the American Canal toll law, requested that the matter to be submitted to the Hague tribunal for adjudication. The American Government declared that this course would not be just to the United States, since the majority of the court would be composed of men, the interests of whose countries would be identical with those of England in such a controversy. Before leaving office President Taft proposed that the matter should be submitted to the Supreme Court of the United States. The whole question was left in that situation when the change from the Taft to the Wilson administration took place."

In the face of the present commercial unsettlements, with the United States marooned, unable to ship more than 17 per cent. of its products in its own bottoms to Europe, it would seem probable that the political grey-beards, marplots, owls, obstructionists, and do-nothings, at Washington, might be brought to some glimmering realization of the wisdom of a country, a half-continent in extent, with 100,000,000 of inhabitants, and with over two thousand miles of seaboard, on two oceans, having some ships. But it seems incredible also that nothing but the horrors of a barbarous war should be the teacher of this elementary lesson. Besides the surrender of the Free Tolls-whatever benefit that might have effected-the Wilson administration also nullified the 5 per cent. preferential duties for goods shipped in American ships.

The democrats, hopelessly entangled in prejudices, and obdurately prepossessed against individual success, disconcert a progressive nation at every possible angle of its advance with hesitation, and further aggravate the perplexities caused by their stumbling through the persistency of their love to fetter enterprise and delay development.

CHAPTER IX

SHRINKAGE

There seems to be a misfit just now in the national regalia. The old pretensions are too big for us, and a haunting disgust over our déshabille appearance makes life the least bit uncomfortable.

We have grown thinner perhaps. Some political malaise has disturbed the usual quickness and thoroughness of our assimilation either of the praise of others or of our own self-esteem. The coat of our usual complacency sits too loosely on our shoulders; the collar of the same coat would span a neck twice the size of the present one—our own—that sustains more weariedly, than was wont, a thinking capitulum, which may be mournfully conscious, too, that the original beaver of Brother Jonathan is some sizes too big for it.

Then a rummaging examination of the pockets of the same coat reveals an unexpected, an unaccustomed emptiness, and the bandanna, always tucked away in the coattails, with enough defiantly drooping outward to catch the sun on its red, white, and blue stripes, is either no longer useful, or else has been stolen, mislaid, or, in the exigencies of our new housekeeping, has been sent to the laundry.

Our waistcoat, a glittering emblem itself of repletion and audacity, is pulled into disgraceful and unseemly wrinkles, from an attempt to tighten it to an attenuated

thorax, once so jubilantly inflated, indomitable, and sonorous. The trousers, too, are baggy at the knees—perhaps from too much kneeling or stooping-and though never before departing from a Beau Brummel austerity of justeau-corps, no longer reveal in their tense lines the strong limbs they once covered. The feet-well, their encasement seems about the same, with the patent leathers less shiny, and the spats less decorously and dandily attached.

And then, allowing our reminiscent or introspective thoughts to reveal some further tokens of shrinkage less patent, there is discovered a halting power of self-assertion in ourselves. We are not quite as sure of being right as we once were, and have fallen into an abominable habit of apology. We have contracted an unfailing symptom of timidity-it is a neurotic affection locally remarkable in the Jumpers of Maine. We start or even cry aloud when touched on the back. It betokens a peculiar fear of attack, and an alarm of interruption. We have yielded to an inaction which forbids our taking steps forward unaided, and some experts in neurological strains aver that we have become incapable of even contriving a fresh start.

We suffer from the idée fixe, a kind of hallucination that leads to apathy or madness; we believe that disturbance is better than progress, and regulation superior to renovation, and it is impossible to eradicate the notion, because we are told so every day, and every minute of the day-and-there again is a symptom of our moral diminution-we believe everything we are told. A good many wise men have elaborated the art of talking so persuasively, or at least so constantly, that the rejection of an inheritance would be almost easier to us just now-than the exercise of enough judgment to question their statements. If that is not a sign of devolition, shrinkage, mental abne

gation, emotional flatulency, then the guides in pathology -national pathology-have erred.

The SHRINKAGE, interpreted how you will, is a little remarkable, but if we survey our national policies, and the record of our various Moseses in national destinies, the effect illustrates the usual adequacy of the cause; the usual proportion between the blow and the recoil. There is really nothing strange about it, incomprehensible as it might at first seem to the disembodied spirits of our former selves. Unfortunate of course, but-bless your heart -perfectly natural!

We have altered over night the practice of years, and are expected, with an elasticity that belongs to rubber dolls, acrobats, stage magicians and worms, to accommodate our enormous business activity to the cramped quarters of an undisguised curtailment of opportunity. Our new tariff, the pet madness of democrats, the distinguishing glory of the New Freedom, is closing factories, discharging workmen, endangering the industries of whole states, disabling enterprises, and scattering with as lavish a hand as the cupidity of Europe can summon for their distribution, the products of cheap labor, to the detriment of those who have acquired the self-respect of independence under a freedom less new than Wilson's, but infinitely more enjoyable.

The farmer, the favorite resort for justification and for votes, of the democratic apologist, in his tirade against protected interests, will himself sooner or later find that, like the independent land tillers of Rome, before the upheaval of the Sempronian laws he, too, must retreat before an unequal competition with slave-made products. The new law is working fatally to-day, the processes of destruction have begun, but the ravages of its continued