was a considerable body of opinion in America which held that the Act of 1912 had contravened existing treaty obligations, but against that was to be set the strong national feeling of some millions of patriotic citizens quite unqualified to pronounce on the legal merits of the case.

President Wilson early decided that the Act must be repealed, though the Democratic platform of 1912 had pronounced in its favour. There was no opportunity of dealing with the question in the crowded session of 1913, but in March 1914 the President went down to Congress to urge the cancellation of the exemption provisions. In a brief but impressive address he gave it as his judgment that "exemption is in plain contravention of the Treaty with Great Britain concerning the Canal concluded on November 19, 1901 "; and in the light of that conclusion he proceeded (in language that is not without a bearing on the much-discussed "too proud to fight" passage in a later speech) to contend that "we are too big and powerful and too self-respecting a nation to interpret with too strained or refined a reading of words our own promises just because we have power enough to give us leave to read them as we please," and that as a consequence "the large thing to do is the only thing we can do-voluntary withdrawal from a position everywhere questioned and misunderstood." The message ended with an enigmatic sentence generally interpreted as referring to the Mexican difficulty, in which the President declared that if repeal was not granted

ΙΟ

"I shall not know how to deal with other matters of even greater delicacy and nearer consequence."

It is a striking tribute to the force of the President's personality that his appeal for action running counter to the judgment of a substantial section, and to the sentiment of a much more substantial section, of the American people should have proved immediately effective. The divisions in the two Houses produced a good deal of crossvoting, Mr. Underwood and a number of Democrats opposing the measure, while Senator Lodge and several other Republicans supported it. The Bill was passed by the House by 247 votes to 162, and by the Senate by 50 to 35. It was signed by the President in June 1914.

Two other minor measures concerning Panama revealed in the President the same desire for straight dealing that he had evinced in the matter of the tolls. The original owner of the Panama Canal zone was Colombia, and it was while President Roosevelt was actually negotiating with Colombia for its acquisition that an opportune revolution in the Panama area enabled him to abandon the deal with the larger republic and purchase the Canal rights from the insurgent population then organizing itself as the State of Panama. The revolution proved of the highest benefit to the United States, but Mr. Roosevelt's attitude towards Colombia was emphatically condemned by a section of his own countrymen— and as emphatically defended by the President himself and his partisans. Colombia presented

various demands to the United States, the most tangible a claim for the payment of $10,000,000, which had not been met when Mr. Wilson came into office. Consistently with his views on PanAmerican union, he held that the United States could and should afford to be generous rather than rigidly just in its relations with a small Latin republic, and he proposed the payment to Colombia of $25,000,000 in settlement of all claims. A treaty on that basis was approved by the Senate in 1916, but is not yet ratified.

I

A somewhat similar arrangement was effected with Nicaragua, which possessed a rival canal route. By an incomprehensible departure from the President's consistent principles a Bill was presented by Mr. Bryan in 1913 which would have practically established a United States protectorate over Nicaragua. It failed to pass the

Senate, and in 1916 a treaty on much more reasonable lines, securing to the United States a naval base on the Nicaraguan coast and an option on the canal route in consideration of a payment of $3,000,000 to Nicaragua, was signed and ratified. The initial object of both these transactions was to provide against the acquisition of rival canal routes by any extra-American Power; but the spirit in which they were negotiated made effectively for the restoration of goodwill between the United States and two weak but suspicious Latin republics. A similar anxiety for the prosperity of the Panama Canal led in 1916 to the acquisition on purely strategic I January 1917.

grounds of the Danish West Indies, which lay within striking distance of the Canal in the Caribbean Sea. Their purchase had been under negotiation on various occasions from the time of the Civil War onwards.

Two other particular problems, immigration restrictions and Philippine independence, and one general, the negotiation of peace treaties with all Powers prepared to accept them, occupied the attention of the State Department during Mr. Wilson's first Administration. The immigration

question caused him much personal anxiety. Asiatic immigration on the Pacific slope was always a fruitful source of friction, and in 1913 matters were brought to a head by the introduction into the Californian legislature of a Bill prohibiting aliens ineligible for citizenship of the United States from holding land in the State. This provision was manifestly aimed at the Japanese fruit-planters settled in California, and it provoked forcible protests on the part of the Japanese Ambassador. The Bill passed the Californian Lower House by a large majority, and despite a personal appeal from Mr. Wilson, and a conference between the State Government and Mr. Bryan, whom the President sent West to try and stop the Bill, it was passed by the Senate and signed by the Governor. During its discussion an amendment was inserted which saved the measure from actually infringing existing treaties with Japan (in which case the Supreme Court might have invalidated it), but left the Act provocative and offensive to the

fruit-growers themselves, their Ambassador, and their Government.

The immigration problem confronted the President at Washington as well as in California. In 1914 two measures were introduced into Congress, one a general Immigration Bill, the other a Japanese Exclusion Bill. The latter was shelved through Mr. Wilson's influence, but the former was proceeded with and eventually passed by both Houses. Apart from codifying clauses, the measure provided for the exclusion of African negroes and imposed a literacy test which the President considered would involve harsh and unjust discrimination against a large class of immigrants, including political refugees, whom America had readily admitted in the past and whom she should be prepared to welcome still. Accordingly he made this one of the rare occasions for exercising his Presidential veto, and the Bill in consequence lapsed. It was, however, reintroduced in the following session in a form even more antagonistic to the President's views, and passed the Senate by an overwhelming majority (64) votes to 7). In January 1917 it once again came before the President for his assent, and once again that assent was refused.

Japan was indirectly involved in another question which has caused and will cause some embarrassment to succeeding administrations at Washington. The Philippine Islands, like Cuba and Porto Rico, passed from Spanish control to American after the war of 1898, but conditions in the two cases were entirely different, in that