Nicaragua comes next. There again they were quite angry with us on top, but controlled in the end by the persisting disposition of kinship. They had land in Nicaragua with the idea of an Isthmian Canal. This we did not like. They thought we should mind our own business. But they agreed with us in the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty that both should build and run the canal.
Vagueness about territory near by raised further trouble, and there we were in the right. England yielded. The years went on and we grew, until the time came when we decided that if there was to be any canal, no one but ourselves should have it. We asked to be let off the old treaty.
England let us off, stipulating the canal should be unfortified, and an “open door” to all. Our representative agreed to this, much to our displeasure. Indeed, I do not think he should have agreed to it. Did England hold us to it? All this happened in the lifetime of many of us, and we know that she did not hold us to it. She gave us what we asked, and she did so because she felt its justice, and that it in no way menaced her with injury. All this began in 1850 and ended, as we know, in the time of Roosevelt.
About 1887 our seal-fishing in the Behring Sea brought on an acute situation. Into the many and intricate details of this, I need not go; you can find them in any good encyclopedia, and also in Harper’s Magazine for April, 1891, and in other places. Our fishing clashed with Canada’s.
We assumed jurisdiction over the whole of the sea, which is a third as big as the Mediterranean, on the quite fantastic ground that it was an inland sea. Ignoring the law that nobody has jurisdiction outside the three-mile limit from their shores, we seized Canadian vessels sixty miles from land. In fact, we did virtually what we had gone to war with England for doing in 1812. But England did not go to war. She asked for arbitration. Throughout this, our tone was raw and indiscreet, while hers was conspicuously the opposite; we had done an unwarrantable and high-handed thing; our claim that Behring Sea was an “inclosed” sea was abandoned; the arbitration went against us, and we paid damages for the Canadian vessels.
In 1895, in the course of a century’s dispute over the boundary between Venezuela and British Guiana, Venezuela took prisoner some British subjects, and asked us to protect her from the consequences. Richard Olney, Grover Cleveland’s Secretary of State, informed Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister of England, that “in accordance with the Monroe Doctrine, the United States must insist on arbitration”—that is, of the disputed boundary. It was an abrupt extension of the Monroe Doctrine. It was dictating to England the manner in which she should settle a difference with another country. Salisbury declined. On December 17th Cleveland announced to England that the Monroe Doctrine applied to every stage of our national Life, and that as Great Britain had for many years refused to submit the dispute to impartial arbitration, nothing remained to us but to accept the situation. Moreover, if the disputed territory was found to belong to Venezuela, it would be the duty of the United States to resist, by every means in its power, the aggressions of Great Britain.
This was, in effect, an ultimatum. The stock market went to pieces. In general American opinion, war was coming. The situation was indeed grave.
First, we owed the Monroe Doctrine’s very existence to English backing.
Second, the Doctrine itself had been a declaration against autocracy in the shape of the Holy Alliance, and England was not autocracy. Lastly, as a nation, Venezuela seldom conducted herself or her government on the steady plan of democracy. England was exasperated. And yet England yielded. It took a little time, but arbitration settled it in the end—
at about the same time that we flatly declined to arbitrate our quarrel with Spain. History will not acquit us of groundless meddling and arrogance in this matter, while England comes out of it having again shown in the end both forbearance and good manners. Before another Venezuelan incident in 1902,I take up a burning dispute of 1903.
As Oregon had formerly been, so Alaska had later become, a grave source of friction between England and ourselves. Canada claimed boundaries in Alaska which we disputed. This had smouldered along through a number of years until the discovery of gold in the Klondike region fanned it to a somewhat menacing flame. In this instance, history is as unlikely to approve the conduct of the Canadians as to approve our bad manners towards them upon many other occasions. The matter came to a head in Roosevelt’s first administration. You will find it all in the Life of John Hay by William R. Thayer, Volume II. A commission to settle the matter had dawdled and failed. Roosevelt was tired of delays.
Commissioners again were appointed, three Americans, two Canadians, and Alverstone, Lord Chief Justice, to represent England. To his friend Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, about to sail for an English holiday, Roosevelt wrote a private letter privately to be shown to Mr. Balfour, Mr. Chamberlain, and certain other Englishmen of mark. He said: “The claim of the Canadians for access to deep water along any part of the Alaskan coast is just exactly as indefensible as if they should now suddenly claim the Island of Nantucket.” Canada had objected to our Commissioners as being not “impartial jurists of repute.” As to this, Roosevelt’s letter to Holmes ran on: “I believe that no three men in the United States could be found who would be more anxious than our own delegates to do justice to the British claim on all points where there is even a color of right on the British side. But the objection raised by certain British authorities to Lodge, Root, and Turner, especially to Lodge and Root, was that they had committed themselves on the general proposition. No man in public life in any position of prominence could have possibly avoided committing himself on the proposition, any more than Mr. Chamberlain could avoid committing himself on the ownership of the Orkneys if some Scandinavian country suddenly claimed them. If this embodied other points to which there was legitimate doubt, I believe Mr.
Chamberlain would act fairly and squarely in deciding the matter; but if he appointed a commission to settle up all these questions, I certainly should not expect him to appoint three men, if he could find them, who believed that as to the Orkneys the question was an open one. I wish to make one last effort to bring about an agreement through the Commission…. But if there is a disagreement… I shall take a position which will prevent any possibility of arbitration hereafter;… will render it necessary for Congress to give me the authority to run the line as we claim it, by our own people, without any further regard to the attitude of England and Canada. If I paid attention to mere abstract rights, that is the position I ought to take anyhow. I have not taken it because I wish to exhaust every effort to have the affair settled peacefully and with due regard to England’s honor.”
That is the way to do these things: not by a peremptory public letter, like Olney’s to Salisbury, which enrages a whole people and makes temperate action doubly difficult, but thus, by a private letter to the proper persons, very plain, very unmistakable, but which remains private, a sufficient word to the wise, and not a red rag to the mob. “To have the affair settled peacefully and with due regard to England’s honor.” Thus Roosevelt. England desired no war with us this time, any more than at the other time. The Commission went to work, and, after investigating the facts, decided in our favor.