CHAPTER XII

GOOD FAITH AND JUSTICE TOWARD ALL

NATIONS

Washington's Farewell Address to the people of the United States is regarded as a great American Classic and is taught in the public schools of America and held up to the youth as a political ideal. In speaking of our foreign relations, he said: "It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel ex. ample of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence." It was this ideal that President Wilson adopted for his guidance in dealing with foreign countries. The practice, however, of certain Senators and Members in drawing from the national treasury unfair and unjust appropriations for their respective states, contemptuously referred to as "pork barrel" legislation, is about the attitude, as a rule, of one nation to the remainder of the world.

In August, 1912, while the Presidential campaign was in a very acute stage, Congress enacted a law providing for the future administration of the Panama Canal. One section in that law gave free passage through the canal

to the ships of the United States engaged in coastwise. trade, but provided that all other American ships, as well as all ships of foreign countries, passing through the canal, should pay a toll.

This whole question was very freely discussed by the people of this country before the passage of this act, and both political parties went on record as favoring the exemption from tolls of American ships engaged in coastwise trade. However, the British government and other nations objected to our favored treatment of our own shipping, on the ground that it violated the HayPauncefote Treaty. It was contended by the Taft administration and Congress that it was never understood when the treaty was ratified that Mr. John Hay, our ambassador, was signing away our rights to the free use of the canal for coastwise trade. Therefore, the law was passed over the protest of the British government and to the surprise of the nations of Europe.

When President Wilson was inaugurated, the canal was incomplete, but plans were being matured for its formal opening. The protests of foreign nations, however, against what they considered was an act of injustice on the part of the American government, seemed to rob this nation of much of the glory for bringing to completion such a tremendous undertaking.

After Mr. Wilson became President, he came to the conclusion that the old Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850 was an agreement between the United States and Great

Britain that neither country should have exclusive control over any inter-ocean canal in Central America, and that the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, which superseded the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, was a guarantee to Great Britain, or its wording was such as to leave the impression on the European nations, that the canal would be open to both nations and to all nations on the same terms.

Moreover, it developed after the American coastwise vessels were exempt from toll, that out of the hundreds of regular trans-Atlantic liners, only six ships were flying the American flag, but that the American coastwise shipping was a vast fleet. According to the figures quoted by an English writer, Mr. Winthrop Marvin, our coastwise fleet was greater than the entire German merchant marine and greater than the combined merchant marines of France and Italy. It appeared, therefore, that very nearly all of the American vessels were exempt from toll by the Repeal Act, and Mr. Wilson considered this a violation certainly of the spirit, if not the letter, of the treaty.

The Panama Canal was not opened until August 14, 1914. In the meantime, President Wilson was giving the matter of toll exemption very careful study, and in February he wrote to Mr. William L. Marbury, of Baltimore, a letter which indicated how his mind was working on the problem:

"With regard to the question of canal tolls my

opinion is very clear," he said. "The exemption constitutes a very mistaken policy from every point of view. It is economically unsound; as a matter of fact, it benefits for the present, at any rate, only a monopoly and it seems to me, in clear violation of the terms of the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty. There is, of course, much honest difference of opinion as to the last point as there is, no doubt, as to others. But it is at least debatable, and if the promises we make in such matters are debatable, I, for one, do not care to debate them. I think the country would prefer to let no question arise as to its whole-hearted purpose to redeem its promises in the light of any reasonable construction of them rather than debate a point of honor."

His program had two distinct purposes in view(1) to destroy monopoly, and (2) to restore the rule of right and justice in all foreign relations as well as in domestic affairs. As the discussion of this question continued, the opinion grew that the exemption clause encouraged monopoly and was a violation of the rule of right and justice.

For the time the country forgot the anti-trust bills in Congress and gave all attention to this, the newest sensation. The old question of how far a party is bound

by a plank in the platform was discussed pro and con. It was argued, furthermore, that the exemption act was indirectly a subsidy, and that the Democratic platform was emphatic in its opposition to subsidies, which encouraged monopolies, and since the final step in the overthrow of monopoly was about to be taken, the exemption clause in the Panama Canal act should be repealed even before the anti-trust laws were enacted. Mr. Wilson started the nation to discussing the question. Then he withdrew from the argument for a while and waited until March 5, when he appeared before Congress, and in the following words asked that body to reverse its position in the exemption clause of the Panama Canal act:

"Gentlemen of the Congress," he began, "I have come to you upon an errand which can be very briefly performed, but I beg that you will not measure its importance by the number of sentences in which I state it. No communication I have addressed to the Congress carried with it graver or more far-reaching implications as to the interest of the country, and I come now to speak upon a matter with regard to which I am charged in a peculiar degree, by the Constitution itself, with personal responsibility.

"I have come to ask you for the repeal of that