can customs, and Morales complied. A treaty was signed on February 4, 1905, constituting the United States the receiver for the bankrupt republic. Fifty-five per cent of the Dominican customs were to be applied to the liquidation of the debt, and the other 45 per cent to be used for current expenses. The Senate refused to ratify the Dominican treaty; but Roosevelt went ahead with the plan under an executive agreement with the island, appointing a confidential agent to investigate the finances of Santo Domingo and authorizing Secretary Taft to nominate the officer to collect the revenues. The President announced to Congress that such arrangement would continue until the Senate should take action on the treaty. He was roundly abused in the Senate for this piece of "executive usurpation," but the success of his policy was so complete that the Senate eventually ratified the treaty in slightly altered form (February 25, 1907). Under the American receivership the Dominican treasury received more from the 45 per cent of the customs receipts turned over to it by our collector than it had received from its own corrupt officials who had handled the entire revenues. The claims of the creditor countries were scaled down to $17,000,000, and the interest obligations were promptly met. The convention of 1907 is still in force; and while we have intervened at times of threatened revolution, under the permissive clauses of the treaty, to protect our officials in the performance of their duty, there has been "no intention to destroy Dominican sovereignty." This policy of "the exercise of an international police power" for the collection of the revenues or the preservation of the stability of a Latin-American neighbor has been called "the Roosevelt corollary of the Monroe Doctrine." It is fraught with the gravest consequences for the relations of the United States with the other countries of this hemisphere.1

Just as Roosevelt's first message contained practically the whole program of his administration, so the major measures of the first full year of his presidency, the "marvelous year" of 1902, introduced most of the activities of the six years which

1 Some of the effects of this policy will be noticed in our treatment of the relations of the United States and the Caribbean countries in a later chapter.

followed. The prosecution of the Northern Securities Company announced the policy, pursued in some forty indictments brought later by his Attorneys-General, of making the big corporations, whose inevitability he always recognized, conform to the law of the land. The intervention in the anthracite-coal strike revealed his endeavor to secure an impartial treatment for the interests of both capital and labor, based on a frank and open presentation of their claims, and his dominant concern for the public welfare when threatened by the selfish obstinacy of either of the contending parties. The frustration of Germany's designs in Venezuela by the threat of Dewey's powerful squadron in the West Indies illustrated his conception of the Monroe Doctrine. "Speak softly and carry a big stick" was his own picturesque phrasing of the doctrine of our responsibility for the preservation of order in the Caribbean region. Panama, Santo Domingo, Portsmouth, Algeciras, the Hague, are all names which exemplify the Rooseveltian policy of American prestige, which culminated in the impressive voyage of a powerful fleet of American battleships around the world during the last eighteen months of his administration.

Most fruitful of all the measures of the "marvelous year," however, and the one most dear to the heart of the President himself, was the inauguration of the policy of the reclamation and irrigation of the arid lands of the West on a national scale. It was estimated by the Department of the Interior that over four hundred million acres of Western land suitable for agriculture were lying useless for want of sufficient rainfall. Projects for irrigation by private or state capital had made little progress when Roosevelt came into the presidency. In his first message he defined the forest and water problems as "perhaps the most vital internal problems of the United States." He was largely instrumental in securing the passage of the Newlands act by Congress (June 17, 1902), by which 95 per cent of the money received from the sale of public lands in sixteen "cowboy states" of the West and Southwest was set apart as a special reclamation fund for the construction of irrigation works. The money paid by the users of the water, plus the proceeds from the sale of the

newly irrigated lands, was to be added to the revolving fund. Under its beneficent operation huge reservoirs, dams, viaducts, and canals have been built, and millions of acres that were formerly sandy wastes covered with sagebrush have been converted into fertile fields and gardens. "An annual harvest valued at not less than $250,000,000," writes a member of the reclamation service, "is the desert's response to the intelligent application of water to her sunburned valleys. Practically all of this stupendous miracle has been wrought within the last quarter of a century. . . . The 'Great American Desert' no longer calls up a vision of desolation and horrors. With the westward march of settlers its boundaries have shrunken. Railroads have thrust its barriers aside. Its flowing streams and underground waters are being measured and studied, and we are beginning to grasp faintly a little of its potential greatness."

The reclamation act was the beginning of a policy of the conservation of our natural resources, including the preservation of our forests, the defense of our public lands against fraud and theft, the protection of our game and birds, the creation of national parks, the improvement of our internal waterways, which President Roosevelt pursued with unflagging zeal, supported by men like F. H. Newell, Francis J. Heney, Charles D. Walcott, George H. Maxwell, and, above all, Gifford Pinchot. The month that Roosevelt left the presidency (March, 1909) Senator La Follette wrote in his magazine: "When the historian of the future shall speak of Theodore Roosevelt, he is likely to say that he did many notable things. . . but that his greatest work was inspiring and actually beginning a world movement for staying territorial waste and saving for the human race the things on which and on which alone a peaceful, progressive, and happy race life can be founded."

PANAMA, PARKER, AND PORTSMOUTH

No other act of President Roosevelt's administration was the cause of greater satisfaction to himself or offense to his critics than the acquisition of the Panama Canal in the late autumn of

1903. The political controversy arising from this act was finally settled on March 1, 1922, by the exchange of ratifications of a treaty by which the United States agreed to pay the republic of Colombia the sum of $25,000,000 in five annual instalments, in order to "restore the cordial friendship which characterized the relations between the two countries" before the secession of Panama and its recognition and protection by the United States. The historical controversy, however, as to the ethics of our behavior in securing the canal strip is still unsettled, and will probably continue to be so indefinitely. It would lead us far beyond the limits of a single chapter to discuss this great question adequately. We must be content here with a brief outline. The desirability of an Isthmian canal under American ownership grew steadily upon our statesmen during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century. When De Lesseps, the builder of the Suez Canal, organized his Panama Company early in 1880, securing from the Colombian government a right of way across the Isthmus, President Hayes called the attention of Congress to the importance for "our commerce, defense, unity, peace, and safety" of the control of "the great ocean thoroughfare between our Atlantic and Pacific shores," which would be "virtually a part of the coast line of the United States." The scandalous collapse of the French company nine years later opened the way for American initiative. But it was not until nine years later still that the 13,400-mile voyage of the Oregon around Cape Horn from San Francisco to join Sampson's fleet in the West Indies furnished Americans the convincing object lesson. The Spanish War made us a Pacific power, and naval strategy demanded the short cut through the Isthmus which would bring Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines thousands of miles nearer our Atlantic coast. On March 3, 1899, Congress created the Walker commission, with an appropriation of $1,000,000 to investigate the relative merits of the Panama and Nicaraguan routes for a canal.

The obvious preliminary for a canal under exclusive American control was the abrogation of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850, which had established a joint guaranty by Great

Britain and the United States. When this treaty was made, there being no immediate prospect of the construction of a canal by American capital, the United States thought that it had the better of the bargain in preventing Great Britain from securing an exclusive control of a possible waterway. Now that the boot was on the other leg, we found the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty an embarrassment. We have already seen (p. 150) how cavalierly Secretary Blaine tried to sweep the treaty aside. His specious arguments were easily refuted by Lord Granville, and the only result of his policy was to make it harder for his successors in the State Department to make any headway with Great Britain. But the most favorable moment for the resumption of our negotiations with the court of St. James coincided with the moment of our most conscious need for the canal. Great Britain's cordial friendship for us in the Spanish War, her own rather isolated position in Europe on the eve of her struggle with the Boers in South Africa, and the presence in our State Department of John Hay, who had recently been a most acceptable ambassador to the British court, all combined to smooth the path for a revision of the treaty of 1850. The first treaty that Hay negotiated with Lord Pauncefote at Washington (February 5, 1900) was rejected by the Senate because, while securing to the United States the sole right to build the canal, it still left the joint guaranty of neutrality and forbade the fortification of the canal by the United States. Hay, whose relations with the Senate were never cordial, was so offended that he offered his resignation to President McKinley. But the tactful President persuaded him to renew negotiations with Great Britain, and the result was a second Hay-Pauncefote treaty, concluded a few weeks after the accession of Roosevelt (November 18, 1901), which specifically abrogated the treaty of 1850 and contained no prohibition of fortification. The United States should build the canal and have "the exclusive management and policing" of it. This treaty the Senate promptly ratified (December 16) by a vote of 72 to 6.

Just a month earlier the Walker commission had submitted