CHAPTER VIII

THE ASSISTANT SECRETARY

THE two years of freedom from care and worry, of leisure and of travel, which followed the withdrawal from active business in 1903, restored Mr. Bacon's health and made it possible for him to devote himself to a career of public usefulness. He was always anxious to serve the public. He looked upon public service as a duty to be performed, not as an opportunity to be courted, and he felt that the call should be clear and unmistakable.

The summer of 1905 brought to Mr. Bacon this call and this opportunity. On the 5th day of September, 1905, when he accepted the post of Assistant Secretary of State, he renounced his personal preference for private life, offering whatever of ability he had to his country. Within fourteen years his public career began and ended, and upon his activity in these years Mr. Bacon's claim to public remembrance must chiefly

rest.

To him they were busy years; to the world, they were eventful years. He met each changing issue face to face. He did the little things that came to him faithfully. He did the larger things with a sense of their largeness. He did all things with a great devotion. As Assistant Secretary of State, as Secretary of State, as Ambassador to France, and as a pioneer for preparedness for the war with Germany, which instinctively he felt was our war, and later, "somewhere in France," as an officer of the American Army, he showed in each capacity the same single consecration to duty; the same deep sense of responsibility. Officers of high rank with whom he served; civilians in almost every walk of life with whom he came into contact, many of whom he did not know, felt and even expressed the effect of his example of his simple, sincere devotion to the cause in which his heart had enlisted. To him, America was indeed first, but it was an America united and strong at

home in order to be just and generous abroad. For this America he lived; for this America he died.

On July 5, 1905, Mr. Elihu Root was offered the Secretaryship of State by President Roosevelt, to succeed Mr. John Hay, who had just died after months of failing health. Mr. Root accepted the post because he could not well refuse the call to duty from one in whose cabinet he had served as Secretary of War, and because he believed that Mr. Hay's policies, which he approved, and which in many instances as Secretary of State and Secretary of War they had planned and worked out together, should be carried out completely and sympathetically, in the spirit in which they were framed. Mr. Root wanted and required an assistant who would comprehend these plans, to whom their execution could be entrusted, and who could, in case of need, replace his chief in the Secretaryship. Mr. Root believed Mr. Bacon to be the man for the place. He therefore offered it to the younger man, who gladly accepted it.1

The Assistant Secretary is an understudy. Mr. Bacon was that, and he never tried to play the leading part. He always tried to think out what Mr. Root would do or want to have done; therefore, he saw to it that the policy of the Department was Mr. Root's policy carried out to the minutest detail, as Mr. Root would have carried it out if, like Briareus of old, he had had a hundred hands.2 The result was that Mr. Root associated Mr. Bacon with all the work of the Department, having no secrets from him, as Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig said

'Mr. Bacon's admiration for Mr. Root began with the first days of his Assistant Secretaryship. In a letter to his father under date of November 8, 1905, he thus confesses it,

"I am in love with my new chief, Elihu Root, who is a tremendous worker and who has a fund of human sympathy and humour which make him one of the most attractive men I have ever met. It is a privilege to work with him in the public service."

2During Mr. Root's absence in South America in the summer of 1906, negotiations as to the right of Americans to fish in Canadian and Newfoundland waters were particularly troublesome. A modus vivendi acceptable to Great Britain and the United States on the one hand and the British colonists and American fishermen on the other had to be agreed to before the fishing season began. This Mr. Bacon succeeded in arranging, although he held up the final draft until Mr. Root's return, so that it might have his approval. The modus vivendi of 1906 was fully approved by Mr. Root, and it proved so satisfactory that it was maintained with slight modifications until the arbitration of the North Atlantic Fisheries disputes at The Hague, in 1910, rendered a temporary adjustment unnecessary.

of Mr. Bacon on a later occasion.

If Mr. Root had the mind

to contrive, Mr. Bacon's was often the hand that executed. Mr. Bacon's sense of duty and devotion to it are made wonderfully clear by a little incident that happened while he was still Assistant Secretary. As a loyal son of Harvard, he was anxious to have Harvard win the boat race from Yale. He had rowed on the crew when in college; his sons followed in the wake of their father. It was natural, therefore, that Mr. Bacon should want to see Yale beaten at New London in 1906, when his three sons rowed in the three Harvard boats. He slipped away from the Department late one afternoon, after giving minute instructions as to what should be done during his proposed absence of one day. However, he turned up as usual the next morning at the Department, saying in a confused and abashed sort of way that when he got to Jersey City, he thought of the Department and the day's work and came back. He took the night train back from the halfway station, justifying himself to those who chaffed him, "I can't help it, I'm just made that way.

Before assuming personal charge of the Department of State, Mr. Root took a survey of the outstanding business and made up his mind that certain things should be done during his tenure of office. A few words about some of them will show the training which Mr. Bacon received at the hands of a master, which fitted him for the highest posts at home and abroad.

Since the independence of the United States, the rights of American fishermen in Canadian and Newfoundland waters had off and on perplexed American statesmen as well as American fishermen. The Fishery Article of the Treaty of 1783 was supposed to have settled this question upon a basis satisfactory alike to mother country and erstwhile colonies by recognizing the rights of Americans, as far as Great Britain was concerned, to continue to take fish wherever they had fished before the Revolution. But the War of 1812 came, the British contending that war abrogating treaties necessarily abrogated the Fisheries Article of the Treaty of Independence1; the Americans,

'Thus, Lord Bathurst, Secretary of War, and Acting Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in the absence of Lord Castlereagh, said in behalf of Great Britain: "She knows of no exception to the rule, that all treaties are put an end to by a subsequent war." American State Papers, Foreign Relations, vol. iv, p. 354.

that the Article was only suspended by and during the war. The Convention of 1818 between the two countries compromised the differences to the detriment of the fishermen, in a text which has ever since been differently interpreted by the British and American fishermen and their respective countries.

Mr. Root knew from experience that disputes might at any moment arise over this subject; he also knew from experience that the worst time to settle a dispute is during the tension and bitter feeling caused by it. He proved in practice that the best way to settle a difficulty is to get rid of its cause before the concrete dispute has arisen or has assumed political importance. Therefore, before assuming office, he visited the fishing fields in person, and, availing himself of the first friction in the fishing waters to raise the entire question, brought it to arbitration at a time of peace and friendly feeling. The Convention of 1818, authoritatively interpreted by an Arbitral Tribunal at The Hague in the summer of 1910, defined the rights and duties of all parties, and the recommendations of the tribunal, based upon special clauses of the agreement submitting the case to arbitration, provided a method of adjusting future difficulties when and as they should arise.

These great and beneficent results were accomplished by four men of intelligent good will: Mr. Root, assisted by Mr. Bacon on the one hand, and Sir Edward Grey, British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and Mr. James Bryce, British Ambassador to the United States, on the other.

The final negotiations submitting the fisheries dispute to arbitration at The Hague, under Mr. Root's agreement, were conducted by Mr. Bryce and Mr. Bacon. Years after Viscount Bryce said of his relations with Mr. Bacon, "How often have I recalled the work we did together for furthering friendship and good relations between America and England, and how pleasant it was to deal with him. Such was the candour of his mind and the earnestness of his wish to settle everything in a way fair and just all round-the right temper in which a Secretary of State in any country should approach his tasks."

'Letter of Lord Bryce to Mrs. Bacon, shortly after Mr. Bacon's death.

During the entire period of Mr. Root's Secretaryship of State Mr. Bacon lived in an atmosphere of Pan-Americanisman Americanism so large and all-embracing as to include not merely the twenty-one Republics in esse, but also in posse, "The Lady of the Snows," the great dominion to the north of these United States.

The American Republics were to hold the third Conference of the Americans at Rio de Janeiro in the summer of 1906. There was a proposal by Russia, the initiator of the Hague Conferences, to hold the second conference of the series at The Hague during the summer of 1906. The two conferences could not well be held during the course of the same summer.

As the date of the meeting of the Pan-American Conference had "long been fixed" for the 21st day of July, 1906, Mr. Root felt that it should not be changed. He therefore proposed that the Conference at The Hague should be held at a later date. His suggestion was accepted, and that body met at The Hague in June of the following year.

Mr. Root was desirous that all the American Republics should be invited to send representatives to the conference at The Hague. He entered into negotiations to that end. They were all invited and, with the exception of Costa Rica and Honduras, they all attended. It seemed to Mr. Root that the Conference could not claim to represent and to speak for the world unless the American Republics were present. In addition, he wished to have them drawn into the world current, and become accustomed to play their part in international gatherings, in the belief, justified by the event, that the intellectual benefits of such participation to the American States would outweigh any resultant drawbacks to the Conference through the increase of its numbers. It is thus apparent that Mr. Root's interest in the American Republics was not merely Platonic; it was very deep and very real. It was so deep and so real that he attended the Conference in person, and in the address which he delivered, as honorary president, he placed the relation of American States upon their right basis, proclaiming, as Mr. Bacon aptly called it, "the Root doctrine of kindly consideration and honourable obligation."

Mr. Root could not very well attend the opening session of the American Conference at Rio and refuse invitations to visit at