The Mirrors of Washington

by Clinton W. Gilbert; John Kirby

Not being a big committee chairman, Mr. Root was not of counsel in the big cases. He tried to associate himself with counsel but the traditions of the Senate and the jealousy of Senators were against him. He had not the passion for public service that makes Reed Smoot and Wesley Jones miraculously patient with the endless details of legislation. After six years he quit.

"I am tired of it," he said to Senator Fall, "the Senate is doing such little things in such a little way." It was different from public life under Roosevelt where one did not notice size of what they did—one has not yet noticed the size of what they did—for the grandeur of the way they did it.

I have said that Mr. Root's mind with its advocate's bent always occupied itself with the justification of other men's views, his chief's or his party's. There was one notable exception, his break with the Republicans while he was in the Senate on the question of discriminating in favor of American shipping through the Panama Canal. A clever lawyer's argument can be made that when the United States said "all nations" in its treaty with Great Britain regarding the Canal it meant all nations except itself. But Mr. Root declined to make it, holding that plain morality and a greater respect for the obligations of a treaty than Bethman Hollweg expressed when he called them scraps of paper required this country to charge just the same tolls for American ships using the canal as for British ships or any other ships using it.

The general Republican argument is that thus interpreted, the Hay-Pauncefote treaty is so foolish and so inconvenient a treaty that Mr. Hay must not have meant what he said when he wrote it, and really did mean something that he wholly failed to say. The reasons for contending that Mr. Hay meant no tolls for the United States and tolls for England, when he wrote the same tolls for everybody are highly ingenious and as it was a Democratic President who was asserting that Mr. Hay used language in its ordinary sense, Mr. Root as a Republican might have been expected to declare that Mr. Hay used it in quite the reverse of its ordinary sense. But he did not. He supported the Democratic President and treated the Republican position as if it had not the slightest taint of legality in it, to the lasting shock of Mr. Harding, on whose side the precedents are, for nations do say "all nations," and are later found to mean all nations but themselves when their virtuous promises to make no exceptions in their own favor turn out to be inconvenient.

When Mr. Root took a high moral stand on the treaty it was said among Republican Senators that he was thinking more of the transcontinental railroads which were fighting competition by water than he was of the sanctity of international engagements. The probability is that he was probably thinking more of John Hay and Elihu Root than he was of either. He was in the Cabinet when John Hay as Secretary of State made the treaty. Senator Lodge, the only other Senator to agree with Mr. Root and disagree with his party about the meaning of all nations, was John Hay's closest friend. Probably both of them, intimately associated with Mr. Hay, had their part in the making of the treaty. They had perhaps the sensitiveness of authors about their capacity to say exactly what they meant. They wanted to recognize their own international piece when it was put on the stage by the commercially minded producers of the Senate.

The history of the Hay-Pauncefote treaty is interesting and unfamiliar. Attaching Pauncefote's name to the treaty was a delicate act of international courtesy since there is Pauncefote's word for it, privately spoken, that he had nothing to do with the writing of it.

Hay draughted the treaty by himself probably with the cognizance of Root and Lodge, the great lawyer who was his associate in the Cabinet and his closest personal friend in the Capitol. Hay then handed it to Pauncefote, the British minister here. Pauncefote transmitted it to the foreign office in London which received it with surprise and probably with satisfaction, for the Clayton-Bulwer treaty which it in a sense revived, had been forgotten for nearly half a century. Delay is the rule of foreign offices.

Perhaps Mr. Hay's treaty was not so generous as it seemed on first reading, a suspicion which seems to have been justified by the interpretation put upon it by the final authority upon international engagements, the Republican National Convention at Chicago. And if it was as generous as it seemed let not America think Great Britain too eager in accepting it, let America pay a little to overcome the reluctance of Great Britain in setting her approval upon the new contract.

At last, after much apparent hesitation, the foreign office agreed to the new treaty in consideration of America's throwing in, with it an arbitration of the Bering Sea dispute. President Roosevelt interpreted Mr. Hay's arbitration contract much as the Republican National Convention interpreted Mr. Hay's treaty, by appointing American arbitrators who promised beforehand, in giving a fair and impartial hearing to the Canadian claims, always to vote for the American position and to resign and be succeeded by others if they found that they could not do so.

Why, then, the prevailing distrust of Mr. Root? His public morals regarding the Hay-Pauncefote treaty were better than those of his party, even if we accept the view that they were dictated by nothing more than a certain mental integrity, a certain consistency with himself. He was as virtuous in the taking of the Panama Canal as the virtuous Mr. Roosevelt. He had the advocate's honesty of being true to his client, whether his client was the public or the great corporations. Mentality was uppermost in him, so that he took primarily a logical rather than a moral view of all questions; but also so much that he could not pretend, could not act, and thus he was more honest than the politicians.