IN JUSTICE TO THE UNITED STATES-A SET

TLEMENT WITH COLOMBIA

By Earl Harding

As a people we have been so engrossed with interest in the building of the Panama Canal that we have given but little thought either to the means employed in securing the right to build it, or the uses to which it shall be put. The Canal has been our one great national enthusiasm aside from baseball. We have been fascinated by its bigness and its military glamor. We have accepted indifferently the official diplomatic version of the accomplished fact of the secession of the Department of Panama from the mother country, Colombia, and since the apparent collapse of the senatorial investigation of 1906, most of us have forgotten the preliminaries and have turned our attention to watching "the dirt fly."

One result of our national enthusiasm was to create an atmosphere jealous of investigation and impatient of criticism. Editors learned, or thought they learned, that the very word "Panama" was loaded with danger because the public seemed not to be able to differentiate between exposure and condemnation of the lawless acquisition of the Canal Zone and an attack upon the Canal enterprise itself. Wherefore there was a long period during which intelligent discussion and honest criticism of the Panama affair were so unpopular as to be almost entirely suppressed.

Many a time I have been advised to "forget Panama.” Many a time I have been told by men who should know better, that the people of the United States would never look back of their glorified Canal far enough to see its inglorious history. They were unwise prophets. The Canal itself has made the people of the United States think. They are beginning to realize that to "take" the Isthmus and "make the dirt fly" were phases of a national problem quite apart

from the operation of the Canal under conditions of international friendliness. Such conferences as this have been made possible by a new popular interest in the countries to the south of us, and this interest has been created by the Canal. Through such activities as this the vital importance of the Panama question is being brought home to the thoughtful people of the United States.

"In Justice to Colombia," the title given by the editor to an article in October World's Work in which I suggested a readjustment of boundaries at Panama as a step toward a settlement with Colombia, failed to reflect the spirit in which I wrote. I am not pleading for justice to Colombia; I hold no brief to present her claims; my major concern and sympathy are for my own country, and I bespeak a settlement of the "Panama question" in justice to the United States.

Most, if not all, of us believe in international justice in the abstract; but when it comes to the accomplishment of this ideal, whenever it is proposed in such a case as the affair of Panama to undo, so far as may be possible, an international wrong, we are confronted by the protest of that brand of jingoism that is too narrow ever to acknowledge a national fault. We are told that a consistent and unbroken front must be presented to the exterior world; that a nation's foreign policy, no matter how unrighteous or illadvised, must be given undivided support, and that to gainsay it is sedition. We are solemnly told that if we really did steal Panama we must not confess it by making reparation; that it is nobler for us and our children and our children's children brazenly to endure the stigma thrust upon us by one overt act than to permit the nation to acknowledge and make amends for the commission of a flagrant international wrong.

He who sets out to tell the truth about the affairs of Panama must, therefore, answer first for himself this ethical question:

Does citizenship impose the moral obligation to uphold your government in an immoral foreign policy, when the life of the nation is not at stake?

For myself, I refuse to subscribe to this dual standard of political morality-one code of ethics for our domestic affairs and another for our foreign relations. I have no patience with the patrotism that holds our public servants to account, by criticism, investigation or impeachment, for what they may or may not do at home, yet absolves them from moral and legal restraint and holds their acts above review or repudiation the moment they cross our international boundary and commit some lawlessness in the name of the people of the United States.

Nor do I believe that the thoughtful men and women of this country imagine that as a nation we would suffer loss of character or caste or self-respect by frank acknowledgment that in a moment of ill-advised haste, in the false light of distorted truth, we committed an act of international injustice for which we desire to make honorable amends.

As to the entire righteousness of Columbia's claims and the method for adjusting them, public opinion in the United States has crystallized only in part, but there is a consensus approaching unanimity in the view that we cannot afford longer to ignore a weaker nation's demand that its case be given a fair hearing. The average citizen has gathered the impression that there was something questionable, at least, in our seizure of the Isthmus, and he wants the mess cleaned up. I am inclined to credit this aroused public opinion more to our awakening commercial consciousness than to a stimulated sense of abstract justice, though both forces have been conspicuously active in the few years that have passed since it was virtually impossible to obtain a hearing on the merit of Colombia's claims. We have waked up to a realization that it isn't good business to have Latin America forever pointing to our treatment of Colombia as justifying its aversion to "the Great Pig of the North." We have been experiencing a changed attitude toward all of Latin America with the approaching opening of new avenues of trade expansion; our commercial interests recognize as they never have before, that they have misunderstood and neglected a great, undeveloped world of opportunity southward, and that self-interest if not national self-respect

demands that the Panama controversy, as an obstacle to cordial relations, should be settled at any reasonable costand settled before the opening of the Canal.

Our question is, then, no longer shall we settle with Colombia but how can we settle?-and by settlement I mean not merely the award and collection of damages, not the enforced payment of a ledger account ten years past due, but such an adjustment as shall satisfy the injured pride of a despoiled and affronted nation, and rehabilitate the United States in the confidence and esteem of our southern neighbors.

How generous, how far-reaching that adjustment should be in order that it may meet the requirements of international justice and at the same time serve effectively to accomplish the essential material results, is a problem that calls for sober thought and helpful, sympathetic counsel both within and without governmental circles. We need a more intelligent and general comprehension, in the United States and in Colombia, of the rights and wrongs of the Panama question, if we are to have a public opinion that will recognize and support a just and effective settlement. And in endeavoring to create an enlightened public opinion we shall be discouraged at times, I fear, by the obstinacy of certain prejudices-particularly the prejudices of those persons who have been content to accept without proof the diplomatic version of the Panama affair.

The situation we must meet is set forth very concisely in a recent editorial in the Chicago Tribune, which I will read:

Colombia's grievances against the United States have always found a closed door because of the prevailing American opinion that there could be no equity in the claims of a nation caught so openly in sharp and dishonest practices. The Roosevelt retort, fostering and protecting the Republic of Panama, was accepted generally as a piece of larger justice, and Colombia, raging in its discomfiture, was observed with amusement.

Colombians have never ceased to press their demand for arbitration, and it has been an unusual procedure for the United States to be deaf to such an appeal. The prevailing opinion that a small rascal hurt by his own tricks was the plaintiff explains the indifference and obduracy here.

It is reported now that Secretary Bryan is willing to accept the demand for arbitration. It is altogether better so; better policy and fair justice. The United States should give Colombia a chance to put its loss in figures and present a statement of its damages to an impartial court. If it have in equity a claim for damages the claim should be met. A nice regard for our national honor requires at least a hearing.

This editorial is literally true. Ten years' denial of even a hearing can be attributed to a popular impression that this charge of attempted blackmail against Colombia was just. The accusation was false so devoid of a basis of real fact that to its denial might be coupled all the qualifying adjectives that we have heard so often with the short and ugly word. The charge was foisted first upon the public through the sinister activities of the Panama Canal Company's lawyer and lobbyist, whose amazing confession that he bent to his employers' selfish ends the Congress, the President and the Secretary of State of the United States, is a document of public record.

I have searched the record of diplomatic correspondence transmitted to the United States senate, the Spanish version of the same records and Colombia's instructions to her diplomatic representatives in the archives of the foreign office at Bogota, the annals of the Colombian congress and the files of the Colombian papers of the period, and I find no vestige of justification, official, semi-official or unofficial, for this accusation of attempted blackmail against the United States. Yet it is upon this charge, iterated by a selfish and corrupt lobby and reiterated as cumulative slander by a man who should be aware of the truth-upon this accusation supported by no more than the assertion of interested persons, has public opinion hostile even to a hearing of the case been maintained in the United States.

A still more humiliating aspect of the truth is that the only suggestion that would warrant the assumption of a contemplated "hold-up" was not directed against the United States, but against the French Panama Canal Company, or the holders of its securities, who in certain proved instances were speculative bankers in Wall Street. Colombia never demanded, nor so much as officially or unofficially