V

QUALITY IN THE FOREIGN POLICY OF THE UNITED STATES

Throughout its history the United States has professed to stand for the same principle, a position which has been frequently affirmed by its official spokesmen. The first formal and official statement of the principle in America is the opening sentence of the Declaration of Independence:

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

In the negotiations for peace in 1782, Jay did not consider that independence required any aid or validity from British acts, "provided that nation treated us as she treated other nations, viz., on a footing of equality."39

In 1796, the United States minister to England wrote to Secretary Pickering, suggesting that open letters might be obtained from the French and British ministers in order to insure an uninterrupted passage. replied:

Secretary Pickering

If a public minister going to his place of destination must pass through the territories of the belligerent powers, passports for him through a neutral would be

39 Jay to Livingston, Paris, Nov. 17, 1782, harton, Revol. Diplom. Corresp. of the U.S., Vol. VI, p. 17.

expedient; but the ocean being the highway of all nations, it would seem to me to derogate from our equal rights as a sovereign power, to seek protection there under any passport but our own.40

After the United States became strong enough to assert without question its own "equal rights as a sovereign power," the obligation to accord similar rights of equality to other and weaker nations was not infrequently invoked against it by its own statesmen. When President Grant's administration employed the United States navy in support of negotiations for the acquisition of a part of San Domingo, in 1871, Senator Sumner secured the insertion of the following resolutions of protest in the records of Congress:

Resolved, That, since the equality of all nations, without regard to population, size, or power, is an axiom of International Law, as the equality of all men is an axiom of our Declaration of Independence, nothing can be done to a small or weak nation that would not be done to a large or powerful nation, or that we would

We

40 Pickering to King, June 17, 1796, Moore, Digest, Vol. IV, p. 559. Referring to the basic principles of foreign policy established during Washington's administration, Johnson says: "The first of these cardinal doctrines was that of impregnable independence, and the equal sovereignty of the United States with any and all other nations of the world. France more than any other had striven to deny and to prevent this, and to make us a mere dependency upon her. But we had wisely and indeed necessitously insisted upon fulfilment of the Declaration of Independence. were no quasi-state, no dwarf or cripple, no mere probationer on sufferance. We were a full-fledged, full-grown nation, possessed of all the functions, powers, and rights of national sovereignty, the peer in legal standing of any other nation in the world; inalienably endowed with full powers, in Jefferson's pithy phrase, 'to do all acts and things which independent States may of right do. America's Foreign Relations, Vol. I, p. 201. There is a flavor of vaingloriousness about the statement, but it gives a pretty accurate description of the spirit of American statecraft at the end of the eighteenth century.

not allow to be done to ourselves; and therefore any treatment of the republic of Hayti by the Navy of the United States inconsistent with this principle is an infraction of international law in one of its great safeguards, and should be disavowed by the Government of the United States.

Resolved, That since certain naval officers of the United States, with large war-vessels, including the monitor called the Dictator and the frigate Severn, with powerful armaments, acting under instructions from the Executive and without the authority of an act of Congress, have entered one or more parts of the republic of Hayti, a friendly nation, and under the menace of open and instant war have coerced and restrained that republic in its sovereignty and independence under International Law; therefore, in justice to the republic of Hayti, also in recognition of its equal rights in the family of nations, and in deference to the fundamental principles of our institutions, these hostile acts should be disa41 vowed by the Government of the United States.

Secretary Bayard gave official expression to the same principle fifteen years later in his report on Pelletier's

Case:

for this.

By the law of nations, it must be remembered, all sovereign states are to be treated as equals. There is no distinction between strong states and weak; the weak are to have assigned to them the same territorial sanctities as the strong enjoy. There is a good reason Were it not so, weak states would be the objects of rapine, which would not only disgrace civilization, but would destroy the security of the seas, by breeding hordes of marauders and buccaneers, who would find their spoil in communities which have no adequate power of self-defense. 42

Discussing the question of diplomatic intervention in behalf of disappointed litigants, Secretary Gresham declared in 1893 that "complete reciprocal international equality"

41 March 23, 1871, Cong. Globe, 42d Cong. 1st session (1871), Pt. I, p. 235.

42 Sen. Ex. Doc., 49th Cong. 2d sess. (1886-87), Vol. I, No. 64, p. 14.