CHAPTER XXVI

HAY AND ROOSEVELT

William McKinley, during his second tenure of the Presidency, was assassinated at Buffalo on September 6, 1901. His last public address (on September 5) had been a plea for international co-operation and harmony, with a view to which he advocated reciprocal tariff arrangements between States. The Vice-President, Theodore Roosevelt, took his place, without election, according to the provisions of the Constitution. By this time the Canal Treaty had been signed, the Alaskan boundary was in a fair way to be settled, but the Anglo-Boer War was still going on, and unfortunately aroused illfeeling in the United States. However, the war was over in the year following Roosevelt's entry into the Presidency.

Hay was very disappointed at the attitude of some of the American public towards Great Britain during the Boer War. When he "went to his desk" at the State Department in October, 1898, he would have been quite ready, apparently, to make a treaty of alliance with Great Britain, but "it could never get through the Senate," he said. Then the Boer War came (October, 1899-May, 1902), and feeling became worse.

As long as I stay here [he wrote to the Secretary of the American Embassy in London, Henry White, on September 24, 1899] no action shall be taken contrary to my conviction that the one indispensable feature of our foreign policy should be a friendly understanding with England. But an alliance must remain, in the present state of things, an unattainable dream.1

He was so earnest in his desire to remain in friendship with Great Britain that his political opponents accused him of having made a secret treaty of alliance. Hay rebutted the ridiculous charge easily; but he had strong words for the anti-British people who wantonly tried to stir up trouble.

1 Thayer, The Life and Letters of John Hay, II, 221.

Whatever we do, Bryan will attack us as slaves of England. All their [the Democratic] State conventions put the anti-English plank in their platform to curry favour with the Irish (whom they want to keep) and the Germans (whom they want to seduce). It is too disgusting to have to deal with such sordid liars.

(To Henry White, September 9, 1899).1

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Hay deplored the defeats which British troops suffered in the early months of the war. "The serious thing," he wrote to Henry Adams in June, 1900, "is the discovery-now past doubt—that the British have lost all skill in fighting; and the whole world knows it, and is regulating itself accordingly." A certain Bourke Cockran wrote to the President what Hay described as a fool letter," demanding that the United States should side with the Boers. It fell to Hay to reply. "I declined," he wrote to Henry White, "to reply to it, except by acknowledging receipt." He wholeheartedly backed Great Britain's cause in South Africa: Sooner or later her influence must be dominant there, and the sooner the better" (to Henry White, September 24, 1899). Hay was acting both from conviction and from gratitude. His biographer thinks that Joseph Chamberlain had told him of a remark made by the Kaiser Wilhelm II to an Englishman, referring to the Spanish-American War: "If I had had a larger fleet, I would have taken Uncle Sam by the scruff of the neck." 2 Hay was now paying Great Britain back for her benevolent neutrality in 1898.

Before the Boer War began, the United States and the British Governments had resumed negotiations on the old question of an interoceanic canal. Doubtless the particular importance in international relations after 1890 of affairs in the Far East, and especially the rise of Japan, had something to do with the reemergence of the Canal Question in an acute form.

The French Construction Company which had the concession from Colombia for making a Panama Canal finally collapsed in 1888. Since then the opinion in the United States had been coming more and more to favour the view that the United States should itself make and own the Canal. But the famous Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850 still stood in the way, saying that neither Great Britain nor the United States "will ever obtain or maintain for itself any exclusive control over the said Ship-canal." The treaty also contemplated the construction of the Canal by a private company or 2 Ibid., 279.

1 Thayer, op. cit., II, 220.

corporation. All other friendly States were to be invited to enter into the stipulations of the treaty.

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the United States Government had sufficient resources of its own with which to make the Canal. But if it was to make and own the Canal it must get the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty out of the way. So Hay, as soon as the Spanish-American War was over, initiated negotiations with Great Britain. He made no attempt, as Blaine had done, to try and explain away the treaty: he accepted it as a fact and asked frankly for its suppression.

Acting on instructions from Hay, the Secretary of the United States Embassy, Henry White (Choate had not yet been appointed Ambassador) paid a visit to Lord Salisbury at Hatfield in December, 1898. The diplomatist and the statesman had some conversation in the library at Hatfield after breakfast. Lord Salisbury agreed in principle to the American proposal, stipulating only that the tolls to be levied on the Canal should be the same for all nations using it. He suggested that the British Embassy at Washington and the State Department might take up the negotiations. After this conversation, Mr. White went out for a day's shooting with Lord Salisbury and his lordship's sons; and in the evening he sent off a cablemessage to Washington.

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The result of the White-Salisbury interview was that Hay and Pauncefote took up the Canal question at Washington, and worked out an agreement. Sir Julian's conduct in the matter has been everything that we could desire," wrote Hay to White on February 14, 1899. The agreement required time, however, and was not signed until February 5, 1900, by Hay and Pauncefote; it permitted the United States Government to construct a Canal with the exclusive right of regulating and managing it; but the Canal was to be free and open in times of war and peace; there was to be no discrimination against any nation or its citizens in respect to charges for traffic; the Canal was never to be blockaded, nor was any act of hostility to be committed within it.

The Senate rejected this Convention on the ground that it would prevent the United States from fortifying the Canal. The British Government, on the other hand, and the Central American States, who were vitally interested in the Canal undertaking, set great store by the condition preventing fortification. Oddly enough too, although the public of the United States wanted the British Govern

ment to make the great concession, it was at the same time showing rather high ill-feeling, largely on account of the Boer War. There was, wrote Hay, "a mad-dog hatred of England." However, Hay was above this prejudice; and the British Government was all kindness. On November 18, 1901, Lord Pauncefote (a peer since 1899) and the Secretary of State signed a treaty, substantially the same as that of the previous year, providing for neutralisation of the Canal, and for equal dues to all nations or their citizens using it, but with an important addition. This was the last sentence in the following clause:

The Canal shall never be blockaded, nor shall any right of war be exercised nor any act of hostility be committed within it. The United States, however, shall be at liberty to maintain such military police along the Canal as may be necessary to protect it against lawlessness and disorder.1

The Treaty, thus improved, passed the Senate in the following month, and was proclaimed by President Roosevelt on December 26. The clause about military policing of the Canal has been, the leading historian of American diplomacy says, liberally interpreted by the Government of the United States. Nevertheless, the vessels of war as well as of commerce of all nations who observe the rules of the treaty are free to go through the Canal at all times.

The Canal negotiations were complicated by the fact that the United States and Great Britain had a dispute going on at the same time about the frontier of Alaska. Hay wanted to keep the questions of Alaska and the Canal quite separate, and rightly so. The British Government agreed with this view; there was to be no trading of one thing against another. So the Canal Question was seriously tackled and disposed of. Then came Alaska.

This was a controversy which the two Governments had included in the twelve points to be dealt with by the Joint High Commission of 1898-9; but the Commission came to an end without accomplishing anything. The point at issue arose out of the Russo-British Treaty of February 28, 1825, which stated that the frontier was to run along the crest of the mountains between Alaska and Canada,

1 Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, November 18, 1901, Article III, Clause 2. The last sentence, as printed in the Treaty, is not in italics.

2 Fish, American Diplomacy (ed. 1923), pp. 436-7. Cp. Latané in Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1902, vol. I, p. 302: "The terms of the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty are so ambiguous that the United States will have pretty much her own way in regard to the Panama Canal.”

at a distance of thirty miles from the Ocean. The controversy between Great Britain and the United States was now "whether the strip of coast which by the Treaty is to belong to Russia [and to the United States after 1867] runs around the shores of the inlets or across their mouths." 1 If the frontier were drawn parallel to the Ocean, at a distance of thirty miles from the extreme tip of each promontory, it would cross the water of several Alaskan bays; and the Canadians would thus obtain access to the salt water of the Alaskan coast. But, according to the view of the United States, the frontier should go parallel to the Ocean, and at a distance of thirty miles from it at every point, thus shutting off the Canadians completely from the Alaskan salt water.

On grounds both of reason and of treaty-interpretation, the view of the United States appears, on the whole, the better; on grounds of reason, because the men who made the Treaty of 1825 can scarcely have meant to cut Russian Alaska into several different portions, as would have happened if the frontier line ran across the promontories and mouths of bays; on grounds of treaty-interpretation, because of the words of the treaty of 1825: "the fringe (lisière) of coast mentioned as having to belong to Russia shall be formed by a line parallel to the sinuosities of the coast, and which can never be farther away from it than ten marine leagues." The intention of this stipulation is not absolutely clear, and there was room for an honest difference of opinion; but now that the decision has gone in favour of the United States few people, probably, will be prepared to question it.

It was not until January 24, 1903, that the Convention for the adjudication of the Alaskan boundary was signed by Secretary Hay and Sir Michael Herbert. Lord Pauncefote had died at his post in Washington in 1902. Sir Michael Herbert had been chargé d'affaires at Washington after the Sackville incident, and again in 1892-3. During his short period as Ambassador (he died on September 30, 1903) he proved as good as Lord Pauncefote in smoothing away difficulties. The Convention of Washington provided ingeniously for a Commission of six members, three to be nominated by Great Britain and three by the United States. Thus if, in making its final report, the Commission was equally divided, there would be no decision. The Convention stated that the final award was to be

1 Mr. Choate to the Marquis of Salisbury, January 22, 1900, in Parliamentary Papers, 1904, CXI, p. 16.