alive or Rais Uli dead!" To American ears this had a melodramatic sound, but it was intended for Moroccan ears, and Hay knew well that it would be immeasurably more effective there than any more formal and circumlocutory message; as it was. Perdicaris was soon released. Liberia, always a semi-protectorate of the United States, in 1909 asked for American help in rehabilitating its government, which had fallen into discredit, and a commission was sent thither for that purpose.

Relations with Europe were marked with few incidents of significance beyond those already mentioned. In 1902 Prince Henry of Prussia, brother of the German emperor, visited this country and was received with all possible cordiality and distinction. During his stay here great impetus was given to the organization of a great German-American National League, which in subsequent years played an important part in international politics. In the fall of that year Secretary Hay addressed a note to the powers signatory to the Berlin treaty of 1878, concerning the oppression of the Jews in Rumania. In 1907, after a long controversy, the United States secured from Turkey equal rights with other powers for the schools and other institutions conducted by its citizens in that empire, and in 1910 it secured for those institutions the right to acquire and own land. In 1909 changes in the United States tariff led to the negotiation of commercial agreements with France, Germany, and other countries, which were completed in the following year.

The year 1912 was marked with a highly interesting extension of the principles of the Monroe Doctrine. Occasion was given for this by the rumors of Japanese aggressions at Magdalena Bay, in Mexico, to which reference has already been made. The Senate in April asked the President for information on the subject, and in reply was assured, on the highest authority, that neither the Japanese government nor any Japanese corporation had acquired, or had ever attempted or purposed to acquire, any land at Magdalena Bay for any purpose. An American syndicate, however, had been attempting to sell to Japanese citizens some tracts of land in that region, but had been estopped from continuing those efforts by an intimation from the state department that such a transaction would not be pleasing to our Government. The accuracy of this report from the state depart

ment was amply confirmed by senatorial investigation, whereupon, on July 31, by the overwhelming vote of 51 to 4, the Senate adopted the following resolution, on motion of Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts:

"Resolved: That when any harbor or other place in the American continents is so situated that the occupation thereof for naval or military purposes might threaten the communications or the safety of the United States, the Government of the United States could not see without grave concern the possession of such harbor or other place by any corporation or association which has such a relation to another government, not American, as to give that government practical power or control for national purposes.

This resolution was criticized by some in the United States as futile if not impertinent; but it was heartily approved by the majority of thoughtful Americans, and in Europe it was taken with sufficient seriousness to cause the suspension or abandonment of various grandiose schemes of corporate exploitation.

I

XXXVI

WAR AND PEACE

N the midst of peace we are in war. Or perhaps the converse is more apt. The closing years of the nineteenth century and the opening years of the twentieth conspicuously formed an era of wars; more marked than any that the world had known before for more than fourscore years. Europe had indeed suffered several important wars, though chiefly involving only four or five nations, and the United States had had one gigantic civil war and one minor war of aggression and conquest against a small and weak neighbor. But this later era, within the space of a single generation, besides innumerable petty wars, saw great conflicts involving four continents and the islands of the sea, with a majority of the principal nations of the world as direct participants. There were the British war in Egypt and the Soudan, the war between China and Japan, between America and Spain, between Great Britain and the Boers, between Russia and Japan, the Boxer war in China, the two Balkan wars, civil war in Mexico, and the War of the Nations which seemed to cast the whole world into the melting-pot. In the twenty-one years from 1894 to 1914 there were at least ten great wars, implicating twenty-three nations and their possessions in practically every quarter of the globe.

Yet in no other period of the history of the world were agencies of peace, particularly for the permanent assurance of peace through the arbitration of disputes, so active, so energetic, and so profusely productive of proposals and treaties. In the course of a dozen years there were as many international irenic conventions as in the century before. The preceding century was, indeed, the first century of anything like arbitration in the present meaning of the term. In the development of that beneficent system the Anglo-Saxon nations took the initiative; particularly the United States. Washington, Franklin, Hamil

ton, and Jay were the pioneers. Wrote Franklin in 1780 to his friend Price: "We daily make great improvements in natural, there is one I wish to see in moral, philosophy; the discovery of a plan that would induce and oblige nations to settle their disputes without first cutting one another's throats. When will human reason be sufficiently improved to see the advantage of this?" He died too soon to see the first practical establishment of such a plan, though it followed soon. Jay made with Grenville in 1794 the epochal treaty which forever bears his name; the treaty which more than any other marks the definite line of demarcation between the age of force and the age of law and reason in international disputes.

Let us recall the circumstances, as a reminder of the greater advance which men had made at the end of the eighteenth century than at the beginning of the twentieth. The peace treaty of 1783 had left a legacy of disputes, largely concerning boundary lines. Jay negotiated for their settlement through arbitration. At once there arose a storm of opposition, detraction, and blind rage such as the nation has scarcely seen equaled. Partly because of greater readiness to fight than to reason, partly because of alien influences which caused inordinate sympathy with France and corresponding hatred of England, the mass of the nation rose against it. Many were opposed to negotiations over any of the points at issue, preferring to fight them out. But even those who would so far "cater to morality" as to settle mere money disputes by peaceful negotiations raged like demons against such disposition of boundary controversies. They swore that they would never submit to arbitration the fate of any territory to which they laid claim; it would be tantamount to consenting to dismemberment of the Union. Amid such sound and fury the words of Hamilton spoke pure reason:

"It would be a horrid and destructive principle, that nations could not terminate a dispute about the title to a particular piece of territory by amicable agreement, or by submission to arbitration as its substitute, but would be under an indispensable obligation to prosecute the dispute by arms, till real danger to the existence of one of the parties would justify, by the plea of extreme necessity, a surrender of its pretensions."

Yet for those words a mob of American citizens tried to mur

der Hamilton! And there was an echo of that mob's ferocity in some of the factional vilification which was poured upon John Hay, more than a century later, for being willing to submit to arbitration the question of title to some small fractions of our Alaskan territory. Happily, Washington stood firmly for the treaty, and secured its ratification. Under it the boundary line between Maine and Nova Scotia, some claims of British subjects against the United States, and counterclaims of Americans against Great Britain, were submitted to a mixed commission for determination. Thus was the modern practice of arbitration begun. In the century which followed the United States was a party to between fifty and sixty individual acts of arbitration, or nearly half of all in the world. The most important of these have been described in these pages.

Beneficent as these acts of arbitration were, and great as was the advance thus marked in the conduct of international affairs, there was yet one thing lacking. These acts were sporadic, not systematic. We were doing the thing which Franklin had desired, but we were doing it merely as separate occasions demanded and not through the operation of a fixed and organized system. No general and permanent plan of international arbitration was made until the penultimate year of the nineteenth century, and no arbitration treaty for more than a special case was made by the United States with any power until the twentieth century was well begun. There were, it is true, suggestions of such a system. The state senate of Massachusetts in 1832 adopted a resolution in which the opinion was expressed that some mode should be established for the final and amicable adjustments of all international disputes instead of resorting to war. A few years later the legislatures of Massachusetts and Vermont took action recommending the convocation of an international congress for the purpose of establishing an international court of arbitration. Nor was the national legislature backward. The senate committee on foreign relations in 1851 reported a resolution to the effect that "it would be proper and desirable for the Government of these United States, whenever practicable, to secure in its treaties with other nations a provision for referring to the decision of umpires all future misunderstandings that cannot be satisfactorily adjusted by amicable negotiation in the