possibility of double meaning and amplification of the vague indefinite and embarrassing obligations of Article VIII.

Besides this we did not permit Great Britain to succeed in the attempt to adopt the rules jointly with us after refusing it in Article III, wherein the United States adopts the rules alone, as we see the appearance of the High Contracting parties adopting the agreement cut out. Now let us consider the Treaty in its final form. (See Ap

pendix.)

The Literary Digest of December 22, 1900 states:

The temper of the Senate was first made evident by its adoption of the Davis amendment (passed by a vote of 65 to 17) permitting measures which the United States may find necessary to take for securing, by its own forces, the defense of the United States and the maintenance of public order.

Two other amendments were proposed by Senator Foraker and accepted by the Committee on Foreign Relations, the first declaring that the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty is hereby superseded and the other eliminating Article III, which provided that the other powers should be invited to adhere to the Treaty.

The great wisdom of referring treaties to the Senate is demonstrated by the radical changes made in the Treaty from the form in which it was at first negotiated, signed and submitted to the Senate.

The writer feels that the first treaty in no way

safe-guarded the interests of the United States. A good deal of the general misconception of the real meaning of the Treaty lies in the fact that a number of our public men get their impressions of the Treaty from this earlier form and have not followed its careful redrafting. In 1913 in speaking in answer to Mr. Choate at a Chamber of Commerce meeting the writer said:

Read standard treatises on International laws of England or any other country and you will find neutrality defined as a condition existing during time of war; that neutral obligations cannot hold until actual war has begun. Therefore if we have rules for conserving the neutrality of the Canal, they are for the purpose of application to those who are belligerent.

Mr. Joseph H. Choate here interrupted the writer's address saying:

"The Treaty says 'in times of peace and war.''' To which the writer replied:

I beg your pardon, Mr. Choate, you are mistaken. The Hay-Pauncefote Treaty says no such thing as these words were stricken from the first Hay-Pauncefote Treaty by the Senate as it whipped that betrayal of American rights into acceptable shape.

Mr. Choate did not follow the subject further but his opinion that the Treaty confers equal rights has spread throughout the country.

Historical facts should not be stated in mincing words.

In 1891, long after Mr. Lowell's communication

had been made, the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations of the 51st Congress took up the investigation of the Clayton-Bulwer Convention and unanimously stated their conviction that we were fully at liberty to proceed in any way we saw fit to promote the construction of an Isthmian Canal. The Committee was made up of such conservative and capable men and was composed: John Sherman, Chairman, George Edmunds, William P. Frye, William Evarts, J. N. Dolph, John T. Morgan, Joseph E. Brown, H. B. Payne, J. B. Eustis.

Conditions were such that the United States could no longer be bound by the Clayton-Bulwer Convention, we were justified in denouncing it by the flagrant violations of Great Britain and there was a growing sentiment favoring its termination. All the precedents and practices confirm our right to have done so. But we were loath to exercise such right. Great Britain really gave up nothing except a right of mere obstruction for all other rights claimed by her as to us were in violation of the Monroe Doctrine and the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty.

I was a delegate to the Kansas City Convention of 1900 and there the Democratic Party Platform denounced the first treaty as follows:

We condemn the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty as a surrender of American rights and interests not to be tolerated by the American people.

The discussion of the first Hay-Pauncefote Treaty under the mature and capable criticism of the Senate showed how we had simply extended the Clayton-Bulwer Convention's outlawed and violated provisions and validated them.

Senator Foraker referring to this feeling says:

I happen to know that Mr. Hay was familiar with this situation, and this sentiment and purpose. Doubtless the British Government had the same knowledge. At any rate negotiations were suddenly renewed with the result that on the fourth day of December, 1901, President Roosevelt sent to the Senate what is known as the second Hay-Pauncefote Treaty.

Yet every gain made in the shaping of the first into the final treaty as now existing is lost if we admit that neutrality means equal treatment and that under the Treaty the rules for conserving neutrality must govern all conditions of commerce in peace and war and without regard to belligerency, which is what we refused to do in the Hay-Lansdowne negotiations.

CHAPTER V

INSINCERITIES

THE writer has been criticised for saying that he has not read a single sincere argument in favor of the English contention.

Let us quote from the speech of a well-known statesman in which he says:

The merest schoolboy can pass upon the question. I am going to read you two clauses and I should like to challenge any member to show how they can possibly be reconciled :

"The Canal shall be free and open to the vessels of commerce and war of all nations on terms of entire equality, so that there shall be no discrimination against any such nation or its citizens or subjects in respect of the conditions or charges of traffic or otherwise."

That is what the Treaty says:

In the Canal Bill the clause is:

"No tolls shall be levied upon vessels engaged in the coastwise trade of the United States.”

Can you put these two things together and reconcile them in any possible way? Of course, it is an utter impossibility.

And just such argument is spread broad-cast. Men are not sincere in argument when they take from the body of a treaty a qualified and limited