resistance. It at once makes the quarrel in part our own. These are plain principles and we have never lost sight of them or departed from them, whatever the stress or perplexity of circumstance or the provocation to hasty resentment. The record is clear and consistent throughout and stands distinct and definite for every one to judge who wishes to know the truth about it."

McAdoo, touring the country in the campaign, amplified and enlarged upon the President's staunchness of attitude. In the speeches which he made through that time he was a crystal of illumination upon Wilson's position. Out of his temperamental quality of generous admiration and not from the chance of his marriage into the President's family, he gave Wilson the warmest cooperation which any Cabinet officer in a critical period has ever given to his chief. His letters to his close personal friends throughout that time reveal a sympathetic loyalty to Wilson which animated him to splendid partisanship. It was in essence an outcropping of the Cavalier strain, and the blade which he swung in defense of the Wilson policies toward the war was as bright as it was keen. The campaigning was actually the beginning of McAdoo's subsequent tremendous service to the nation in bearing, like a modern Paul Revere, through the Liberty Loans, the message of the spiritual aspect of the war to every village and farm. Concrete in his expression of the ideals involved, he presented issues with a colloquial ease which lost none of their essential fire.

He himself had to stand for counter-attack in the campaign when the suit of the Riggs Bank against the Comptroller of the Currency and himself, charging them with conspiracy to wreck the business of the

institution, came to a trial which, however, did more than vindicate him. Root and Lodge, the intellectual leaders of the opposition, measured him as the most dangerous antagonist, barring the President, to their intentions, and accorded him the distinction of an adversary in appreciation of the fact that it was his measures, the Federal Reserve, the Farm Loan and the Merchant Marine, which were revolutionizing the financial aspects of the United States. The victory of the Democratic party, in 1916, was in no small measure a vindication of McAdoo also; and his continuance in the Cabinet was one of the President's first considerations, for on the eighteenth of November he wrote, "One of the best things about the result is that it means four more years of active association in public service, and in that I genuinely rejoice."

CHAPTER V

LATIN AMERICA

ATIN America, the Cinderella of national groups,

has been to the people of the United States, in spite of the Monroe Doctrine, a neglected opportunity. One of the most serious errors of American foreign policy has been a failure to appreciate the advisability of close relationships with the South and Central American Republics. The barriers of distance and language, both of which might have been overcome by slight but well-directed national effort, kept apart two groups of people who had the common bond of basic democracy until to the Latin American the United States became a materialistic monster in the pursuit of the almighty dollar, and to the North American the southern republics were comic-opera, light-fiction hotbeds of revolution.

Even in ordinary times the neglect was stupid. From the time of Monroe, when by proclamation of American championship of the rights of the Western Hemisphere he insured the liberties of the Latin countries within it, the United States took practically no measure of developing friendship with them until in 1889, James G. Blaine, whom McAdoo characterized as a "a statesman of truly continental vision," arranged the first Pan-American Conference. Some of the Latin representatives came with scarcely-veiled resentment against what they considered an intrusion on the part of the United States to settle differences between them, but the results of the Conference disarmed suspicion, and later conferences in Mexico City, in Rio Janeiro, and in the Buenos Aires, developed a

cordial diplomatic relationship between most of the countries involved and the United States.

There was existent, however, none of the broad trade relationships necessary to bulwark the superstructure of diplomacy, and the delicate adjustment of the Americas was more than once periled by questions of pride and prejudice. One of these was the Colombian Treaty, a storm area inherited by the Democrats from their Republican predecessors. One of President Taft's last official acts had been the transmission to the Senate of the report of the Secretary of State, Philander C. Knox, declaring the impossibility of continued negotiations with the Colombian Government on the matter of reparations for the cutting of the Panama Canal through territory claimed by Colombia. In June, 1914, President Wilson submitted to the Senate a treaty signed at Bogota on April sixth, between the United States and the Republic of Colombia. It was not until March 14, 1917, however, that the treaty was brought out of committee into the Senate with three amendments which emphasized the right of the United States in the building of the canal. Knox, then in the Senate, voted for it as a matter of policy toward South America-the very point for which the administration had aimed-but Lodge, McCumber, Borah, Brandegee and Fall voted against it, presenting a minority report, in spite of which the treaty was passed.

The overthrow of the established Diaz Government of Mexico and the resulting conditions of chaos in that republic projected its menace across the border and became one of the most poignant issues of the first Wilson administration. The President, acting upon a policy which he had declared three weeks after his

inauguration, "refusal to extend the hand of welcome to any one who obtains power in a sister republic by treachery and violence," refused to recognize the new Government. Pressure of every kind, some of it fanatically honest in its zeal to make the United States the policeman of Mexico, was brought to bear upon him, but to no avail. It was a policy which he had expressed because of rigid belief in its righteousness. From first to last, non-recognition of revolutionists, until they had proved their right of representation by honestly conducted election, was his creed.

The financial factor of the Mexican situation brought the Secretary of the Treasury into the affair. On October first he sent to the President this letter:

"Dear Mr. President:

"October 1, 1915.

"If the present conferences about Mexico should result in our recognizing a Government there, one of the most serious problems it will have to face immediately is finances. No Government will be able to sustain itself long, if at all, unless the means for rehabilitating the railways of Mexico, carrying on the Government itself, and paying the defaulted interest on the national debt, to say nothing of the payment of other pressing obligations, are provided. No Government in Mexico will have the credit at the outset to raise the necessary fund. From all I can learn, at least $100,000,000 will have to be provided. The claims for damages to the property of our citizens and foreigners will alone amount to a huge sum, and these claims will no doubt be pressed vigorously as soon as there is an established Government. Confidence in the stability of any Government in Mexico will be delayed for a long