BY CHARLES R. MILLER
Editor of “The New York Times”
WITH A MAP, AND WITH TWO CARTOONS FROM “PUNCH” REPRODUCED BY SPECIAL PERMISSION
FAR from being a subject of importance merely to historians, the Monroe Doctrine is likely, in the months and years to come, to hold the attention of American statesmen and citizens. Our relations to our neighbors in Central and South America, the new responsibilities brought upon us by the operation of the Panama Canal, are among the most important American problems of to-day and to-morrow. It would be impossible to find a writer better informed than Mr. Miller on current affairs, nor one who has more continuously studied the subject at first hand over a period of so many years.—THE EDITOR.
EX-PRESIDENT HARRISON was very testy and Sir Richard Webster unmistakably cross one cool afternoon in September, 1899, when I found a place among the spectators in the Hall of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris, where the Commission of Arbitration in the boundary dispute between Great Britain and Venezuela was in session. General Benjamin F. Tracy was drawn into the area of unpleasantness.
“That is not a way in which I am going to be addressed, General Tracy,” said Sir Richard to the ex-Secretary of the Navy.
Sir Richard Webster was the chief counsel of Great Britain before the Arbitration Commission; ex-President Harrison was the leading counsel of Venezuela, and General Tracy was his associate. It was about the forty-fourth day of the proceedings. The ill temper of these great men arose from no national antagonism, no professional jealousy, for in that noble strife of minds each had come to hold in high respect the legal attainments of the others. But they had entered upon the eighth week of perhaps the most wearisome and uninteresting trial of an international cause of which the chronicles of diplomacy hold any record, and court and counsel were tired out and bored beyond expression.
Two years earlier I had sat in the President’s room at the White House and heard Mr. Cleveland talk of the Venezuela boundary dispute and of his part in forwarding it to a settlement. It was in the month of February, 1897, two weeks before the expiration of President Cleveland’s second term. A few days earlier, on February 2, 1897, Sir Julian Pauncefote, on behalf of Great Britain, and José Andradé, representing Venezuela, had signed at Washington a treaty of which this was the first article:
An arbitral tribunal shall be immediately appointed to determine the boundary line between the colony of British Guiana and the United States of Venezuela.
The signing of that treaty, of which ratifications were exchanged on the following fourteenth of June, was a memorable triumph for President Cleveland, for the Monroe Doctrine, and for the principle of arbitration between nations. For it was a message sent to Congress on December 17, 1895—a message which startled two worlds, that had brought about this agreement to arbitrate the questions in dispute.