DEAR MR. PRESIDENT:
I am spending ten or more of the dog days visiting the Englishman and the Scotchman in their proper setting—their country homes—where they show themselves the best of hosts and reveal their real opinions. There are, for example, in the house where I happen to be to-day, the principals of three of the Scotch universities, and a Member of Parliament, and an influential editor.
They have, of course—I mean all the educated folk I meet—the most intelligent interest in American affairs, and they have an unbounded admiration for the American people—their energy, their resourcefulness, their wealth, their economic power and social independence. I think that no people ever really admired and, in a sense, envied another people more. They know we hold the keys of the future.
But they make a sharp distinction between our people and our Government. They are sincere, God-fearing people who speak their convictions. They cite Tammany, the Thaw case, Sulzer, the Congressional lobby, and sincerely regret that a democracy does not seem to be able to justify itself. I am constantly amazed and sometimes dumbfounded at the profound effect that the yellow press (including the American correspondents of the English papers) has had upon the British mind. Here is a most serious journalistic problem, upon which I have already begun to work seriously with some of the editors of the better London papers. But it is more than a journalistic problem. It becomes political. To eradicate this impression will take years of well-planned work. I am going to make this the subject of one of the dozen addresses that I must deliver during the next six months—"The United States as an Example of Honest and Honourable Government."
And everywhere—in circles the most friendly to us, and the best informed—I receive commiseration because of the dishonourable attitude of our Government about the Panama Canal tolls. This, I confess, is hard to meet. We made a bargain—a solemn compact—and we have broken it. Whether it were a good bargain or a bad one, a silly one or a wise one; that's far from the point. Isn't it? I confess that this bothers me. . . .
And this Canal tolls matter stands in the way of everything. It is in their minds all the time—the minds of all parties and all sections of opinion. They have no respect for Mr. Taft, for they remember that he might have vetoed the bill; and they ask, whenever they dare, what you will do about it. They hold our Government in shame so long as this thing stands.
As for the folly of having made such a treaty—that's now passed. As for our unwillingness to arbitrate it—that's taken as a confession of guilt. . . .
We can command these people, this Government, this tight island, and its world-wide empire; they honour us, they envy us, they see the time near at hand when we shall command the capital and the commerce of the world if we unfetter our mighty people; they wish to keep very close to us. But they are suspicious of our Government because, they contend, it has violated its faith. Is it so or is it not?
Life meantime is brimful of interest; and, despite this reflex result of the English long-blunder with Ireland (how our sins come home to roost), the Great Republic casts its beams across the whole world and I was never so proud to be an American democrat, as I see it light this hemisphere in a thousand ways.
All health and mastery to you!