Chapter VIII: Front Matter (8)

I had a novel experience with these same gulls one Sunday afternoon, which I may as well relate here. I had been out all morning reconnoitering strange sections of London, and arrived near Blackfriars Bridge about one o’clock. I was attracted by what seemed to me at first glance as thousands of gulls, lovely clouds of them, swirling about the heads of several different men at various points along the wall. It was too beautiful to miss. It reminded me of the gulls about the steamer at Fishguard. I drew near. The first man I saw was feeding them minnows out of a small box he had purchased for a penny, throwing the tiny fish aloft in the air and letting the gulls dive for them. They ate from his hand, circled above and about his head, walked on the wall before him, their jade bills and salmon-pink feet showing delightfully.

I was delighted, and hurried to the second. It was the same. I found the vender of small minnows near by, a man who sold them for this purpose, and purchased a few boxes. Instantly I became the center of another swirling cloud, wheeling and squeaking in hungry anticipation. It was a great sight. Finally I threw out the last minnows, tossing them all high in the air, and seeing not one escape, while I meditated on the speed of these birds, which, while scarcely moving a wing, rise and fall with incredible swiftness. It is a matter of gliding up and down with them. I left, my head full of birds, the Thames forever fixed in mind.

It seems odd to make separate comment on something so thoroughly involved with everything else in a trip of this kind as the streets of London; but they contrasted so strangely with those of other cities I have seen that I am forced to comment on them. For one thing, they are seldom straight for any distance, and they change their names as frequently and as unexpectedly as a thief. Bond Street speedily becomes Old Bond Street or New Bond Street, according to the direction in which you are going, and I never could see why the Strand should turn into Fleet Street as it went along, and then into Ludgate Hill, and then into Cannon Street. Neither could I understand why Whitechapel Road should change to Mile End Road; but that is neither here nor there. The thing that interested me about London streets first was that there were no high buildings, nothing, as a rule, over four or five stories, though now and then you actually find an eight- or nine-story building. There are some near Victoria Street in the vicinity of the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Westminster. For another thing, the vast majority of these buildings are comparatively old, not new, like those in New York or Rome or Berlin or Paris or Milan. London is older in its seeming than almost any of these other cities, and yet this may be due to the fact that it is smokier than any of the others. I saw it always in gray weather or through, at best, a sunlit golden haze, when it looked more like burnished brass than anything else. Then it was lovely. The buildings in almost all cases were of a vintage which has passed in America. Outside of some of the old palaces and castles in London,--St. James’s, Buckingham, the Tower, Windsor,--there are no fine buildings. The Houses of Parliament and the cathedrals are excluded, of course.

One evening I went with a friend of mine to visit the House of Parliament, that noble pile of buildings on the banks of the Thames. For days I had been skirting about them, interested in other things. The clock-tower, with its great round clock-face,--twenty-three feet in diameter, some one told me,--had been staring me in the face over a stretch of park space and intervening buildings on such evenings as Parliament was in session, and I frequently debated with myself whether I should trouble to go or not, even if some one invited me. I grow so weary of standard, completed things at times! However, I did go. It came about through the Hon. T. P. O’Connor, M.P., an old admirer of “Sister Carrie,” who, hearing that I was in London, invited me. He had just finished reading “Jennie Gerhardt” the night I met him, and I shall never forget the kindly glow of his face as, on meeting me in the dining-room of the House of Commons, he exclaimed:

“Ah, the biographer of that poor girl! And how charming she was, too! Ah me! Ah me!”

I can hear the soft brogue in his voice yet, and see the gay romance of his Irish eye. Are not the Irish all inborn cavaliers, anyhow?

I had been out in the East End all day, speculating on that shabby mass that have nothing, know nothing, dream nothing; or do they? I could have cried as dark fell, and I returned through long, humble streets alive with a home-hurrying mass of people--clouds of people not knowing whence they came or why. London always struck me as so vast and so pathetic, and now I was to return and go to dine where the laws are made for all England.

I was escorted by another friend, a Mr. M., since dead, who was, when I reached the hotel, quite disturbed lest we be late. I like the man who takes society and social forms seriously, though I would not be that man for all the world. M. was one such. He was, if you please, a stickler for law and order. The Houses of Parliament and the repute of the Hon. T. P. O’Connor meant much to him. I can see O’Connor’s friendly, comprehensive eye understanding it all--understanding in his deep, literary way why it should be so.

As I hurried through Westminster Hall, the great general entrance, once itself the ancient Parliament of England, the scene of the deposition of Edward II, of the condemnation of Charles I, of the trial of Warren Hastings, and the poling of the exhumed head of Cromwell, I was thinking, thinking, thinking. What is a place like this, anyhow, but a fanfare of names? If you know history, the long, strange tangle of steps or actions by which life ambles crab-wise from nothing to nothing, you know that it is little more than this. The present places are the thing, the present forms, salaries, benefices, and that dream of the mind which makes it all into something. As I walked through into the Central Hall, where we had to wait until T. P. was found, I studied the high, groined arches, the Gothic walls, the graven figures of the general anteroom. It was all rich, gilded, dark, lovely. And about me was a room full of men all titillating with a sense of their own importance--commoners, lords possibly, call-boys, ushers, and here and there persons crying of “Division! Division!” while a bell somewhere clanged raucously.

“There’s a vote on,” observed Mr. M. “Perhaps they won’t find him right away. Never mind; he’ll come back.”

He did return finally, with, after his first greetings, a “Well, now we’ll ate, drink, and be merry,” and then we went in.

At table, being an old member of Parliament, he explained many things swiftly and interestingly, how the buildings were arranged, the number of members, the procedure, and the like. He was, he told me, a member from Liverpool, which, by the way, returns some Irish members, which struck me as rather strange for an English city.

“Not at all, not at all. The English like the Irish--at times,” he added softly.

“I have just been out in your East End,” I said, “trying to find out how tragic London is, and I think my mood has made me a little color-blind. It’s rather a dreary world, I should say, and I often wonder whether law-making ever helps these people.”

He smiled that genial, equivocal, sophisticated smile of the Irish that always bespeaks the bland acceptance of things as they are, and tries to make the best of a bad mess.

“Yes, it’s bad,”--and nothing could possibly suggest the aroma of a brogue that went with this,--“but it’s no worse than some of your American cities--Lawrence, Lowell, Fall River.” (Trust the Irish to hand you an intellectual “Your another!”) “Conditions in Pittsburgh are as bad as anywhere, I think; but it’s true the East End is pretty bad. You want to remember that it’s typical London winter weather we’re having, and London smoke makes those gray buildings look rather forlorn, it’s true. But there’s some comfort there, as there is everywhere. My old Irish father was one for thinking that we all have our rewards here or hereafter. Perhaps theirs is to be hereafter.” And he rolled his eyes humorously and sanctimoniously heavenward.

An able man this, full, as I knew, from reading his weekly and his books, of a deep, kindly understanding of life, but one who, despite his knowledge of the tragedies of existence, refused to be cast down.

He was going up the Nile shortly in a house-boat with a party of wealthy friends, and he told me that Lloyd George, the champion of the poor, was just making off for a winter outing on the Riviera, but that I might, if I would come some morning, have breakfast with him. He was sure that the great commoner would be glad to see me. He wanted me to call at his rooms, his London official offices, as it were, at 5 Morpeth Mansions, and have a pleasant talk with him, which latterly I did. He wanted me to meet a Madame N., a French litterateur of over fifty, then staying at the same country place with him near Maidenhead, and hear her very tragic history. He brought an ache to my heart by recounting this same,--a story to which only a Flaubert or a De Maupassant could do justice. It is much too long and too Gallic to relate here.

While he was in the midst of it, the call of “Division!” sounded once more through the halls, and he ran to take his place with his fellow-parliamentarians on some question of presumably vital importance. I can see him bustling away in his long frock-coat, his napkin in his hand, ready to be counted yea or nay, as the case might be.

Afterward, when he had outlined for me a tour in Ireland which I must sometime take, he took us up into the members’ gallery of the Commons in order to see how wonderful it was, and we sat as solemn as owls, contemplating the rather interesting scene below. I cannot say that I was seriously impressed. The Hall of Commons, I thought, was small and stuffy, not so large as the House of Representatives at Washington, by any means.

In delicious Irish whispers he explained a little concerning the arrangement of the place. The seat of the speaker was at the north end of the chamber on a straight line with the sacred wool sack of the House of Lords in another part of the building, however important that may be. If I would look under the rather shadowy canopy at the north end of this extremely square chamber, I would see him, “smothering under an immense white wig,” he explained. In front of the canopy was a table, the speaker’s table, with presumably the speaker’s official mace lying upon it. To the right of the speaker were the recognized seats of the government party, the ministers occupying the front bench. And then he pointed out to me Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Bonar Law, and Mr. Winston Churchill, all men creating a great stir at the time. They were whispering and smiling in genial concert, while opposite them, on the left hand of the speaker, where the opposition was gathered, some droning M.P. from the North, I understood, a noble lord who chose to sit in the Commons rather than in the House of Lords, was delivering one of those typically intellectual commentaries which the English are fond of delivering. I could not see him from where I sat, but I could see him just the same. I knew that he was standing very straight, in the most suitable clothes for the occasion, his linen immaculate, one hand poised gracefully, ready to emphasize some rather obscure point, while he stated in the best English why this and this must be done. Every now and then, at a suitable point in his argument, some friendly and equally intelligent member would give voice to a soothing “Hyah! hyah!” or “Rathah!” Of the four hundred and seventy-six provided seats, I fancy something like over four hundred were vacant, their occupants being out in the dining-rooms, or off in those adjoining chambers where parliamentarians confer during hours that are not pressing, and where they are sought at the call for a division. I do not presume, however, that they were all in any so safe or sane places. I mock-reproachfully asked Mr. O’Connor why he was not in his seat, and he said in good Irish:

“Me boy, there are thricks in every thrade. I’ll be there whin me vote is wanted.”

We came away finally through long, floreated passages and towering rooms, where I paused to admire the intricate woodwork, the splendid gilding, and the tier upon tier of carven kings and queens in their respective niches. There was for me a flavor of great romance over it all. I could not help thinking that, pointless as it all might be, such joys and glories as we have are thus compounded. Out of the dull blatherings of half-articulate members, the maunderings of dreamers and schemers, come such laws and such policies as best express the moods of the time--of the British or any other empire. I have no great faith in laws, anyhow. They are ill-fitting garments at best, traps and mental catch-poles for the unwary only. But I thought as I came out into the swirling city again, “It is a strange world. These clock-towers and halls will sometime fall into decay. The dome of our own capitol will be rent and broken, and through its ragged interstices will fall the pallor of the moon.” But life does not depend upon parliaments or men. It can get along with windless spaces and such forms and spirits as have not yet been dreamed of in the mind of man.

The Thames from Blackfriars Bridge to the Tower Bridge, along Upper and Lower Thames Street, which is on the right bank of the river going up-stream, was my first excursion, though, in making it, I saw little of the river. It is a street that runs parallel with it, and is intersected every fifty or a hundred feet by narrow lanes which lead down to docks at the water’s-edge. The Thames is a murky little stream above London Bridge, compared with such vast bodies as the Hudson and the Mississippi, but utterly delightful. I saw it on several occasions before and after, once in a driving rain off London Bridge, where twenty thousand vehicles were passing in the hour, it was said; once afterward at night when the boats below were faint, wind-driven lights and the crowd on the bridge black shadows. Once I walked along the Embankment from Blackfriars Bridge to Battersea Bridge and beyond to the giant plant of the General Electric Company, a very charming section of London.

But I was never more impressed than I was this day walking from Cleopatra’s Needle to the Tower. The section lying between Blackfriars Bridge and Tower Bridge is very interesting from a human, to say nothing of a river, point of view; I question whether from some points of view it is not the most interesting in London, though it gives only occasional glimpses of the river. London is curious. It is very modern in spots. It is too much like New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Boston; but here between Blackfriars Bridge and the Tower, along Upper and Lower Thomas Street, I found something that delighted me. It smacked of Dickens, of Charles II, of Old England, and of a great many forgotten, far-off things which I felt, but could not readily call to mind. It was delicious, this narrow, winding street, with high walls,--high because the street was so narrow,--and alive with people bobbing along under umbrellas or walking stodgily in the rain. Lights were burning in all the stores and warehouses, dark recesses running back to the restless tide of the Thames, and they were full of an industrious commercial life.

It was interesting to me to think that I was in the center of so much that was old, but for the exact details I confess I cared little. Here the Thames was especially delightful. It presented such odd vistas. I watched the tumbling tide of water, whipped by gusty wind where moderate-sized tugs and tows were going by in the mist and rain. It was delicious, artistic, far more significant than quiescence and sunlight could have made it. I took note of the houses, the doorways, the quaint, winding passages, but for significance and charm they did not compare with the nebulous, indescribable mass of working boys and girls and men and women which moved before my gaze. The mouths of many of them were weak, their noses snub, their eyes squint, their chins undershot, their ears stub, their chests flat. Most of them had a waxy, meaty look, but for interest they were incomparable. American working crowds may be much more chipper, but not more interesting. I could not weary of looking at them.

I followed the Thames in the rain to the giant plant of the General Electric Company, and thought of Sir Thomas More, and Henry VIII, who married Anne Boleyn at the Old Church near Battersea Bridge, and wondered what they would think of this modern power-house. What a change from Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More to vast, whirling electric dynamos and a London subway system! A little below this, coming once more into a dreary neighborhood of the cheapest houses,--mud-colored brick,--I turned into a street called Lots Road, drab and gray, and, weary of rain and gloom, took a bus to my hotel. What I know of the Thames I have described. It is beautiful.

THE MONROE DOCTRINE IN THE VENEZUELA DISPUTE

HOW THAT CONTROVERSY PAVED THE WAY FOR THE PANAMA CANAL

BY CHARLES R. MILLER

Editor of “The New York Times”

WITH A MAP, AND WITH TWO CARTOONS FROM “PUNCH” REPRODUCED BY SPECIAL PERMISSION

Far from being a subject of importance merely to historians,
the Monroe Doctrine is likely, in the months and years to come,
to hold the attention of American statesmen and citizens. Our
relations to our neighbors in Central and South America, the new
responsibilities brought upon us by the operation of the Panama
Canal, are among the most important American problems of to-day
and to-morrow. It would be impossible to find a writer better
informed than Mr. Miller on current affairs, nor one who has more
continuously studied the subject at first hand over a period of so
many years.--~The Editor.~

Ex-President Harrison was very testy and Sir Richard Webster unmistakably cross one cool afternoon in September, 1899, when I found a place among the spectators in the Hall of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris, where the Commission of Arbitration in the boundary dispute between Great Britain and Venezuela was in session. General Benjamin F. Tracy was drawn into the area of unpleasantness.

“That is not a way in which I am going to be addressed, General Tracy,” said Sir Richard to the ex-Secretary of the Navy.

Sir Richard Webster was the chief counsel of Great Britain before the Arbitration Commission; ex-President Harrison was the leading counsel of Venezuela, and General Tracy was his associate. It was about the forty-fourth day of the proceedings. The ill temper of these great men arose from no national antagonism, no professional jealousy, for in that noble strife of minds each had come to hold in high respect the legal attainments of the others. But they had entered upon the eighth week of perhaps the most wearisome and uninteresting trial of an international cause of which the chronicles of diplomacy hold any record, and court and counsel were tired out and bored beyond expression.

Two years earlier I had sat in the President’s room at the White House and heard Mr. Cleveland talk of the Venezuela boundary dispute and of his part in forwarding it to a settlement. It was in the month of February, 1897, two weeks before the expiration of President Cleveland’s second term. A few days earlier, on February 2, 1897, Sir Julian Pauncefote, on behalf of Great Britain, and José Andradé, representing Venezuela, had signed at Washington a treaty of which this was the first article:

An arbitral tribunal shall be immediately appointed to determine
the boundary line between the colony of British Guiana and the
United States of Venezuela.

The signing of that treaty, of which ratifications were exchanged on the following fourteenth of June, was a memorable triumph for President Cleveland, for the Monroe Doctrine, and for the principle of arbitration between nations. For it was a message sent to Congress on December 17, 1895--a message which startled two worlds, that had brought about this agreement to arbitrate the questions in dispute.

In a two-hours’ talk on that February day Mr. Cleveland had reviewed some of the chief acts of his administration, and I asked him to tell me, as far as he felt free to do so, the reasons that had called forth his Venezuela message. He spoke at length upon the subject, and with much freedom. Expressing in substance the impression his words made upon me, I wrote at the time as follows of the message and of Mr. Cleveland’s part in bringing the dispute to a settlement:

These words sounded like war, but they insured peace. How can
anybody who reads them with his eyes fully open fail to understand
what had happened--or rather was about to happen? No gentle and
ladylike remonstrance would have changed the course of proximate
events. The ponderous Executive fist had to come down with a thump
that made people leap to their feet, and it did. The blow was heard
and heeded. First there was a British blue book showing a decent
respect for the opinions of mankind. Then there were negotiations.
Now Venezuela and her powerful co-disputant have honorably come
together in a treaty, and the long controversy goes to arbitration.

“But we were in danger of war, there was a panic, and stock
exchange values shrank four hundred millions.” Let the Stock
Exchange think on its mercies. A war averted does not shrink values
a tenth part as much as a war fought.

It will be well to say in the beginning that the merits of the boundary dispute and the immediate results of the arbitration are not particularly under examination in this article. The finding of the Paris tribunal was a compromise. The extreme contentions of both disputants were denied, although those of Venezuela were abridged much more than the claims of Great Britain. But had England obtained at Paris every square mile of territory to which, in the ultimate stretch of her audacity, she had asserted right and title, the triumph of President Cleveland and of the Monroe Doctrine would have been in no wise dimmed.

The vital essence of that triumph lay in this, that under the constraint laid upon her by Mr. Cleveland’s message of December 17, England submitted to a judicial determination of her title to territory which for more than half a century she had sought to wrest without due proof of ownership from a country too weak to resist her continuing encroachments.

“If a European Power by an extension of its boundaries takes possession of the territory of one of our neighboring republics against its will, and in derogation of its rights,” said Mr. Cleveland in his message, “it is difficult to see why, to that extent, such European Power does not thereby attempt to extend its system of government to that portion of this continent which is taken,” and this, the message continued, “is the precise action which President Monroe declared to be ‘dangerous to our peace and safety.’”

For Great Britain to take territory on this continent before proving title was an act of which the United States by its President complained as “a willful aggression upon its rights and interests.” Great Britain heeded the protest, yielded to our demand for a judicial examination and finding, and Venezuela had her day in court, and that, not the actual and precise position of the boundary line as finally traced, was the whole point of the matter so far as the United States and the Monroe Doctrine were involved in it. That was our triumph.

Historically, the dispute over the boundary between British Guiana and Venezuela dates from the discovery of America and the Spanish occupation. Following in the track of Columbus, who in his third voyage, in 1498, had sailed along the Orinoco delta, his first sight of the mainland of America, the Spaniards, early in the sixteenth century, had explored the country in search of gold. The El Dorado of fable was supposed to lie somewhere in the region between the upper waters of the Orinoco and Essequibo. By right of discovery, exploration, and settlement, for settlements were established later, the Spaniards gained the right to call Guayana their own, for that name was at first given to the South American shore of the Caribbean Sea.

On this map the Schomburgk Line is laid down in conformity with the claims of Great Britain as to its proper position. By the arbitration Great Britain lost the two strips of land within that line indicated on the map by shaded sections, one at the mouth of the Orinoco and the other between Yuruan and Mt. Roraima. Those shaded sections comprise about 5000 square miles, an area a trifle larger than the State of Connecticut, and represent what Venezuela gained in territory within the Schomburgk Line as defined by Great Britain. Venezuela’s political gain consisted in the complete control of the mouth of the Orinoco, the natural outlet to nearly all of Venezuela and of a large part of Colombia.--~Editor.~]

There was in truth a store of gold in the land; the explorers carried stories of their new wealth back to Spain, and before the end of the sixteenth century Sir Walter Raleigh, with a body of English adventurers and certain Dutchmen, visited Guayana in quest of treasure. The Dutch West India Company planted a settlement near the mouth of the Essequibo about the year 1624, and was strong enough to hold it against the Spaniards, who up to that time had been in undisputed possession. The title of the Dutch to the territory upon which they had established themselves was confirmed by the treaty of Münster in 1648, in which Spain recognized the Netherlands as free and independent states. Early in the last century England captured from the Dutch their settlements of Berbice, Demerara, and Essequibo, and in the treaty of 1814 these were formally ceded to her. Thus British Guiana came into being. On the one hand, therefore, Venezuela, when she revolted from Spain in 1811, became vested with the title to all the territory which Spain had held by virtue of discovery and exploration save the districts she had ceded to the Dutch; while, on the other hand, England held British Guiana by cession from the Dutch, who had acquired it from Spain by the treaty of Münster.

In that treaty Spain and Holland had not been at pains to draw the boundary line between Guayana, now British Guiana, and the Captaincy General of Caracas, now Venezuela, and from that act of omission arose all the trouble. For many years after England entered into lawful possession of British Guiana by the treaty of 1814 no dispute over the undefined boundary arose. With the running of what is called the Schomburgk Line in 1849 begins the unbroken chain of events that led to the boundary controversy, brought it to a critical stage, called forth the message of December, 1895, and culminated in the finding and award of the Paris tribunal.

In 1841 the British engineer Sir Robert Schomburgk was commissioned by his Government to ascertain and fix by metes and bounds the line between British Guiana and Venezuela. Then began Venezuela’s protest, and then, too, began the singular migrations of the Schomburgk Line. Lord Aberdeen abandoned it in 1844, but in 1886 it was laid down in British official publications as having made a wide detour to the west, the British maps presenting to the eyes of the Venezuelans a startling incursion upon territory they had supposed to be their own by undisputed title. “The Statesman’s Year Book” of 1885 stated the area of British Guiana to be 76,000 square miles. In 1887, according to the “Year Book,” the area of the colony had expanded to 109,000 square miles. Nor was this the limit of the westward sweep of British pretensions, for in 1890 England obligingly consented to arbitrate her title to a vast tract of territory embracing thousands of square miles wholly outside the Schomburgk Line, and, a circumstance that has oftener explained than excused England’s land hunger, including within its boundaries some of Venezuela’s richest gold mines.

The protests of Venezuela and her appeals for justice became insistent. She demanded an arbitration of the British claims, and her demands meeting with refusal, in 1887 she broke off diplomatic relations. Our aid was invoked by her, and Secretary Bayard tendered our good offices to promote a friendly settlement. Great Britain firmly refused to arbitrate the question except upon the basis of an antecedent concession to her of a very large part of the territory in dispute, including the mouth of the Orinoco and all territory within the extended Schomburgk Line. Meanwhile the Venezuelans grew more and more uneasy as they observed the behavior of British war-ships in and near the mouth of the Orinoco, and the acts of British subjects asserting and exercising rights of occupation and settlement upon territory they held, and rightly held, to be their own.

This was the situation when Secretary of State Richard Olney addressed to Ambassador Bayard in London, on July 20, 1895, that letter of instructions which the British ambassador at Washington described as a “fiery note.” Another British authority called it “Olney’s hectoring note.” Lord Salisbury, very much at his ease, and taking his time about it, replied to this note on November 26. He explained that “it could not be answered until it had been carefully considered by the law officers of the Crown.” It may be recalled that Earl Russell, before making reply to the vigorous protest of our minister, Mr. Charles Francis Adams, against the fitting out of the _Alabama_ in a British shipyard, referred the matter to the “law officers of the Crown.” One of these learned gentlemen having unfortunately lost his mind, there was a delay of some days, of which the _Alabama_ took advantage to escape the jurisdiction by putting out to sea. As the decision of the law officers, when tardily rendered, was that the ship must be seized, it would appear that England should lay the responsibility for the _Alabama_ award of $15,500,000 that she paid to us upon the too deliberate working of her legal machinery.

Secretary Olney in his letter, which of course Mr. Bayard was instructed to lay before Lord Salisbury, had embodied all the substantive declarations of the Monroe Doctrine, and in the very words of Mr. Monroe’s message of 1823. The first fruit of the doctrine, he pointed out, was the independence of South America, for it was to the European Powers banded together in the Holy Alliance, and then preparing to assist Spain in the recapture of her revolted colonies, that Monroe addressed his warning message. Every administration since Monroe’s had given its sanction and indorsement to the doctrine. It had been successfully invoked to put an end to the empire forced upon the Mexican people by Napoleon III, and now it was upon no general justification of interposing in a controversy between two other nations, but specifically upon the Monroe Doctrine, that we based our remonstrance against Great Britain’s high-handed ways with Venezuela.

Great Britain’s assertion of title to disputed territory, followed by her refusal to submit her title to investigation, was “a substantial appropriation of the territory to her own use,” and we should ignore our established policy if we did not “give warning that the transaction will be regarded as injurious to the people of the United States, as well as oppressive in itself.” “While the measures necessary or appropriate for the vindication of that policy are to be determined by another branch of the Government,” continued Mr. Olney, “it is clearly for the Executive to leave nothing undone which may tend to render such determination unnecessary.” This is the passage, doubtless, which provoked the epithets “fiery” and “hectoring.” Those who ponder its meaning may feel that its words were at least ominous.

Lord Salisbury based his reply of November 26 in the main upon the familiar European contention that while the Monroe Doctrine is interesting, and may have had a salutary effect when first promulgated, it has never “been inscribed by competent authority in the code of international law,” and that Mr. Olney’s principle that “American questions are for American decision ... cannot be sustained by any reasoning drawn from the law of nations.” He reviewed the dispute with Venezuela, defended with many and plausible citations of authority Great Britain’s procedure in the territory claimed by her, made a tart reference to “large tracts” of territory once Mexican but now a part of the United States, and firmly declined “to submit to the arbitration of another Power or of foreign jurists, however eminent, claims based on the extravagant pretensions of Spanish officials in the last century, and involving the transfer of British subjects who have for many years enjoyed the settled rule of a British colony to a nation of different race and language, whose political system is subject to frequent disturbances, and whose institutions as yet offer very inadequate protection to life and property.”

The substance and meaning of Lord Salisbury’s despatch, and the attitude which Great Britain assumed, were set forth with conspicuous moderation and fairness by Mr. Cleveland in his Princeton lectures:

These dispatches exhibit a refusal to admit such an interest
in the controversy on our part as entitled us to insist upon
arbitration for the purpose of having a line between Great Britain
and Venezuela established; a denial of such force or meaning to the
Monroe Doctrine as made it worthy of the regard of Great Britain in
the premises; a fixed and continued determination on the part of
Her Majesty’s Government to reject arbitration as to any territory
included within the extended Schomburgk Line. They further indicate
that the existence of gold within the disputed territory had not
been overlooked; and, as was to be expected, they put forward the
colonisation and settlement by English subjects in such territory
during more than half a century of dispute as creating a claim to
dominion and sovereignty, if not strong enough to override all
question of right and title, at least so clear and indisputable as
to be properly regarded as above and beyond the contingencies of
arbitration.[7]

It was then that President Cleveland, patient, but knowing that patience has its bounds, loving peace, and willing to make the full measure of sacrifice to that high end, but with firm conviction that our interposition in the controversy was necessary and could not longer be delayed, sent to Congress the special message of December 17, 1895. That message fixed the attention of the civilized world upon the Venezuela boundary dispute, a matter which had up to that time held only small place in the thoughts of men other than the immediate official participants; for President Cleveland’s plain words brought clearly into view the possibility of war--war between the United States and Great Britain. Christmas was at hand. At that season nobody was thinking of war, and war between the English and ourselves had long been held to be at any and all seasons unthinkable. The civilized world was startled; it is not too much to say that some men of large affairs and international dealings were stunned. “The crime of the century,” was the phrase applied to the message by some whose alarm at the possibility of war was equaled by their ignorance of the long series of disturbing events which led Mr. Cleveland to perpetrate that “crime.”

It was no crime; it was a saving act, a step that made for peace, and removed a source of long-standing irritation that was a menace to peace. The pen of Richard Olney was the one to set forth the legal basis of our demand--the pen of a great lawyer, not too much cramped by the circumstance that it was also the pen of a diplomat. Mr. Cleveland’s strong hand was the one to write the words that proclaimed the Nation’s duty. The Monroe Doctrine has never had a sturdier defender or a sounder defense. Lord Salisbury’s amusingly English and almost sneering references to the doctrine as one “to be mentioned with respect on account of the distinguished statesman to whom it is due,” but having no relation to the affairs of the present day, evoked that memorable sentence in Mr. Cleveland’s message, in which he said that the Monroe Doctrine “was intended to apply to every stage of our National life, and cannot become obsolete while our Republic endures.”

To the Salisbury argument that the doctrine must be ruled out because it has never been inscribed in the code of international law, and “cannot be sustained by any reasoning drawn from the law of nations,” Mr. Cleveland replied that “the Monroe Doctrine finds its recognition in those principles of international law which are based on the theory that every nation shall have its rights protected and its just claims enforced.” When we urged upon Great Britain the resort to arbitration, we were “without any convictions as to the final merits of the dispute”; we desired to be informed whether Great Britain sought under a claim of boundary “to extend her possessions on this continent without right, or whether she merely sought possession of territory fairly included within her lines of ownership.”

Having been apprised of Great Britain’s refusal of an impartial arbitration, “nothing remains,” said the President, “but to accept the situation, to recognize its plain requirements, and to deal with it accordingly.”

Mr. Cleveland, therefore, suggested to Congress an adequate appropriation for the expenses of a commission appointed by the Executive to “make the necessary investigation and report upon the matter with the least possible delay.” Words of grave import followed this recommendation:

When such report is made and accepted, it will, in my opinion,
be the duty of the United States to resist by every means in its
power, as a willful aggression upon its rights and interests,
the appropriation by Great Britain of any lands or the exercise
of governmental jurisdiction over any territory which after
investigation we have determined of right belongs to Venezuela.

In making these recommendations I am fully alive to the
responsibilities incurred, and keenly realize all the consequences
that may follow.

I am nevertheless firm in my conviction that, while it is a
grievous thing to contemplate the two great English-speaking
peoples of the world as being otherwise than friendly competitors
in the onward march of civilization, and strenuous and worthy
rivals in all the arts of peace, there is no calamity which a
great nation can invite which equals that which follows a supine
submission to wrong and injustice, and the consequent loss of
National self-respect and honor, beneath which are shielded and
defended a people’s safety and greatness.

The commission of inquiry was appointed. It promptly began and industriously pursued its investigations for many months, the governments of Great Britain and Venezuela willingly contributing to the success of the commission’s labors by placing at its disposal elaborate statements and all available evidence, while in the archives of Spain and Holland documents were made accessible that threw much light upon the remote origins of the controversy. But before the commission had finished its work, Great Britain and Venezuela, by the treaty of January 2, 1897, agreed to an arbitration. The labors of the commission were not in vain, however. It reached the conclusion that neither the extreme claims of Great Britain nor those of Venezuela were admissible, being unsupported by proofs of title, and the great mass of documentary evidence it had collected was of much use and value for the arbitral tribunal.

By the terms of the Pauncefote-Andradé Treaty, signed at Washington January 2, 1897, Great Britain and Venezuela agreed to the appointment of an arbitral tribunal “to determine the boundary line between the colony of British Guiana and the United States of Venezuela.” The tribunal was to “ascertain the extent of the territories belonging to, or that might lawfully be claimed by, the United Netherlands, or by the Kingdom of Spain, respectively, at the time of the acquisition of the colony of British Guiana,” in order to establish the chain of lawful title. Rules of procedure were prescribed in the treaty. Adverse holding for fifty years, or exclusive political control, as well as actual settlement of a district was to be considered as making a good title; recognition and effect were to be given to rights and claims resting on other grounds valid in international law; and such effect was to be given to the occupation, at the time of signing the treaty, of the territory of one of the parties by the citizens or subjects of the other, as the equities of the case and the principles of international law should be deemed to require. It was provided in article II that the tribunal should consist of five jurists. Those named on the part of Great Britain were Baron Herschel, and Sir Richard Collins of the Supreme Court of Judicature. Baron Herschel having died before the convening of the tribunal, Lord Chief-Justice Russell was named to fill the vacancy. On the part of Venezuela, Chief-Justice Fuller of the United States Supreme Court, and Associate-Justice David Brewer of that court, were named. The fifth member of the tribunal named by these four was Frederic de Martens, the Russian jurist, who became president of the tribunal.

The tribunal assembled in Paris on January 25, 1899. After various and necessary adjournments, it began the formal consideration of the case on June 15. After seven weeks of painstaking toil, in which the story of Spain’s earliest search for the gold of the West, the terms of the treaty of Münster, the law and practice of nations in respect to discovery, occupation, and settlement, and an intolerable mass and multitude of documentary and legal details pertaining to each and all of these matters, had been minutely examined and expounded for the information, but certainly not the edification, of the five learned jurists sitting in judgment in the case, the evidence of nervous strain and irritation to which I have referred in the beginning of this article was apparent. On the forty-seventh day Sir Richard Webster sarcastically invited the attention of ex-President Harrison to certain comments of Sir Travers Twiss on the Oregon case. “I had read Twiss on the Oregon case through long before I had the privilege of seeing you,” replied Mr. Harrison. “This investigation has been long and wearisome,” said General Tracy, but he reminded the tribunal that it involved the “investigation of four hundred years of history.” And on the fiftieth day Mr. Harrison, in closing his argument, said: “Counsel who addresses this tribunal comes to his work in a frame of weariness of mind and body, and he addresses judges who are weary.”

It was on the fifty-sixth day that the tribunal announced its award. The true divisional line, as determined by the unanimous decision of the five jurists, gave sanction, as has been said, to the extreme pretensions of neither party. A large area west of the Essequibo River, to which Venezuela, without warrant, had laid claim, was held to be British territory; but, on the other hand, valuable tracts within the Schomburgk Line were awarded to Venezuela, the most important being the region of which the coast-line runs from Barima Point, at the mouth of the Orinoco, to Point Playa. The confirmation of the title to this territory, as to which Great Britain had firmly refused arbitration, gave Venezuela exclusive control of the mouth of her great river and of both its banks. The vast area, including the rich gold-mines, which Great Britain had belted about by the audacious westward extension of her claims, went altogether to Venezuela.

“THE COMPLIMENTS OF THE SEASON!!”

~President Cleveland~: “Waal, Salisbury, sir, whether you like it or not, we propose to arbitrate on this matter ourselves, and, in that event, we shall abide by our own decision.”

“An inquiry [as to the true divisional line between the Republic
of Venezuela and British Guiana] should, of course, be conducted
carefully and judicially.... When report is made [by a Commission
appointed by Congress] and accepted, it will, in my opinion, be
the duty of the United States to resist by every means in its
power, as a willful aggression upon its rights and interests, the
appropriation by Great Britain of any lands, [etc., etc.,] ...
which after investigation we have determined of right to belong
to Venezuela.”--_President Cleveland’s message to Congress, vide
“Time’s,” December 18._
]

Of the whole territory in dispute, far the larger portion went to Great Britain, and some few persons who uttered cries of distress over the message of December 17 counted this as a rebuke and rebuff for President Cleveland. That was the very hardihood of perversity in taking a false view. Mr. Cleveland had declared that our Government was “without any convictions as to the final merits of the dispute.” The supreme, the vital point is that in the award of the Paris tribunal, accepted by both parties, law triumphed over force. The boundary line was traced, and titles with which Great Britain had vested herself by her own acts, heedless of the protests of Venezuela and rejecting her and our appeals for adjudication, were passed upon by an impartial arbitral tribunal according to evidence and the principles of public law. Whoever gained, whoever lost, that was quite immaterial from our point of view. The process of territorial expansion by stealthy encroachment, by unwarranted shifting of boundaries, and the alteration of maps and statistics, was at an end. The sovereignty of the lawful owner replaced that of the squatter. Venezuela was delivered from duress and from peril, no longer was her soil or her destiny under the menace of foreign control, and the situation created by the attempt of a power over the sea to extend the European system within this hemisphere, which Monroe declared to be dangerous to our peace and safety, and against which Mr. Cleveland had invoked the Monroe Doctrine, no longer existed. Mr. Cleveland had triumphed, the Monroe Doctrine had triumphed, peace had triumphed. General Harrison and Sir Richard Webster parted with expressions of mutual esteem, and the report of the proceedings of the Paris tribunal, in eleven folio parts, now on the shelves of the New York Public Library, was presented by the Marquis of Salisbury, while to Mr. Richard Olney was tendered not long ago the appointment as Ambassador at the Court of St. James’s.

The consequences of this successful and momentous assertion of the Monroe Doctrine may now be traced. Three times within the century of its declaration the doctrine was firmly asserted and maintained by the United States as the public system of the Western World, for it may with entire propriety be called our public system, as the concert of Europe is the public system of that continent. First, when President Monroe proclaimed it as a warning to the Holy Alliance, plotting the restoration to Spain of her revolted colonies in Latin America. Second, when Secretary Seward’s repeated protests against the establishment of an empire and an emperor, the Austrian Maximilian, in Mexico against the will of the people by French arms, were ominously reinforced by the despatch of General Sheridan to the banks of the Rio Grande with 80,000 disciplined and experienced troops, freed from active service by the ending of the war between the States, the French evacuation of Mexico speedily following. The absence of any mention of the Monroe Doctrine in Secretary Seward’s correspondence in respect to the French adventurer in Mexico is without significance. The spirit and the principle of Monroe’s declaration were the declared motives of his action. Third, when President Cleveland, by virtue of the doctrine, “intended to apply to every stage of our National life,” constrained England to submit her boundary dispute with Venezuela to a judicial settlement. The next application of the doctrine, the fourth in this series, all of primary importance, fell within the present century, when the substitution of the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty for the Clayton-Bulwer convention of half a century earlier dissolved our partnership with Great Britain in an agreement to extend a joint protectorship over any transportation route across the isthmus, and so cleared the way for the building and exclusive control by ourselves of the Panama Canal.

The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty was never popular in this country. It was entered into at a time, in 1850, when the discovery of gold in California, and the consequent tide of travel to the land of easily acquired riches, brought into view the need for facilities of transportation across the isthmus; and also, it should be said, when the responsible statesmen of the Nation were perhaps less mindful than at any other time since Monroe’s administration of the import and the saving force of the doctrine that bears his name. Nevertheless, the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty itself, after a fashion, a most illogical and inconsistent fashion, was on our part an attempt to apply the prohibitions of the doctrine against European colonization in this hemisphere. Great Britain was encroaching upon the territory of Central American States, and she stood in the way of the building of the canal. We negotiated the treaty to free ourselves from this embarrassment, and by that singular bargain, through the waiver of a right, we secured the recognition of a right; that is, we persuaded Great Britain to assent to Monroe Doctrine principles in Central America at the price of taking her as a partner in any undertaking for a transportation route across the isthmus, which was in itself contrary to the spirit of the doctrine.

The treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, ending our war with Mexico, was signed February 2, 1848. By its terms Mexico ceded to us the territory now included within the borders of the States of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and parts of Colorado and New Mexico. Great Britain strenuously opposed the cession to us of any territory on the Pacific coast. Failing to control the acts of Mexico in that respect, she took measures in her own way to offset our great territorial gain. Six days after signing the treaty she despatched her fleet from Vera Cruz to the coast of Nicaragua, and forcibly took possession of San Juan at the mouth of the river of that name. She set up a governor, erected fortifications, and changed the name of the place to Greytown. This gave her command of the only canal route then under consideration, for it was at a much later time that the Panama route came to the fore as more practicable. The seizure of San Juan was a move so plainly hostile to our interests that our Government at once sent a diplomatic representative to Nicaragua, and a treaty known as the Hise Treaty was negotiated in June, 1849, by which Nicaragua granted to the United States “the exclusive right and privilege” of constructing a canal or railway between the two oceans across Nicaraguan territory. This treaty was not sent to the Senate and was never ratified by either country.

The occupation of San Juan, or Greytown, by the British, and their proceedings upon the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua, where they had set up a trumpery Indian king, and by virtue of a “treaty” with him assumed a protectorate over the region, were a cause of growing uneasiness at Washington. In pursuance of her age-long policy of insuring her domination of the seas by occupying strategic points giving control of great routes of navigation, Great Britain had with a cool disregard of our rights and interests seized upon vantage-ground in Central America that would make her mistress of interoceanic communication. Holding Greytown, she was in complete control of any Nicaraguan canal, for the only practicable route was that which would make Lake Nicaragua and the San Juan River a part of the canal. Thus, upon the one hand, our freedom of action in respect to a canal was hampered, and, upon the other, England, notwithstanding her many excuses and protestations to the contrary, was manifestly establishing a colony in Central America.