its supremest tests. For within the next four years, the American people were to face the issue of whether to work out in domestic isolation their great experiment in democracy, or whether, imitating most great nations now and in the past, to risk the chances of empire and dominion over seas. T CHAPTER XXII THE TRIUMPH OF IMPERIALISM HE triumph of "sound money" in the internal affairs of the United States meant the advent of a business man's administration, with corresponding objectives in diplomacy. Preservation of the gold standard of value and maintenance of a high protective tariff on the one hand were to be matched on the other by the final annexation of Hawaii and a watchful waiting with respect to Cuba. In Hawaii, curiously enough, annexation and protection were united. Foreign and domestic policy pursued a common object, though their methods of attainment cast little credit on American diplomacy. In making up his cabinet, President McKinley gave first place to John Sherman, a distinguished Senator from Ohio, with claims but slightly inferior to the President's own to be her favorite son. But Sherman, though ripe in years, was somewhat inexperienced in diplomacy. Toward England and the lingering dispute over Bering Sea he exhibited a bluntness well described as "shirt sleeve." His condemnation of certain expert testimony introduced by Great Britain concerning conditions past and present in the seal herd was especially offensive to British sensibilities. He as much as said the expert prostituted scientific knowledge to diplomatic objects. Though possibly correct, an assumption of this sort was not exactly diplomatic. It was fortunate for Anglo-American harmony, so recently disturbed in Venezuela, that the administration was served at London by the suave and diplomatic John Hay, who won the approval of the British public as the most accomplished representative of his country since James Russell Lowell, and of whom the Queen declared that "He is the most interesting of all the Ambassadors I have known.". It was unfortunate for our relations with Japan that McKinley at the outset of his administration reversed his position toward Hawaii. He was earlier on record as opposed to annexation, and inquiries by the Japanese minister at Washington elicited a reply that annexation was not intended. As critics of the President have pointed out, this declaration was no doubt sincere. But the Senate had other views, for in making up a sugar schedule as part of the new Dingley tariff bill, it encountered in Hawaiian reciprocity a stumbling block which could not be surmounted so long as the Islands retained an independent status. Sugar interests in America demanded a bounty. Failing this, they wished exclusion of Hawaiian sugar. The treaty interfered. With it was suspended the entire tariff schedule. The President was persuaded of the danger, and the Hawaiian government-that is to say the negligible minority of aliens in the island-assented to the forfeiture of its treaty rights in return for what it felt to be the weightier advantages of annexation.1 Yet American tariff exigencies could scarcely be expected to weigh greatly with the Japanese, whose nationals already far outnumbered the white men in the Islands. No spokesman for their cause could possibly have put the case more aptly than an American liberal editor whose presentation is so true to fact one hesitates to call it satire. "Our government," declared The Nation, "had not the slightest intention of tricking the Japanese; there is nothing Machiavellian about Mr. McKinley—he was not trying to lull the Japanese Minister to sleep with false pretences. He simply forgot that the tariff and the Senate might compel him to break his promises. It will be a useful lesson to foreign ministers in Washington. They will understand hereafter that all agreements with this country are binding on us only so long as some unexpected hitch in the tariff does not force us to violate them.” 2 The treaty was drawn up in June, 1897, but could not obtain the requisite two-thirds majority in the Senate. 1 The Nation, LXIV, p. 466, June 24, 1897. 2 Ibid. LXV, p. 1, July 1, 1897. Hawaii presented an annexation problem comparable with that of Texas in 1844 and 1845. It was similarly solved. Annexation by joint resolution of both Houses overcame in each case the constitutional opposition of the Senate. Toward accomplishing this result, arguments drawn from the tariff were supplemented by the lessons of the naval situation in the war with Spain. For some time Admiral Mahan, America's eminent historian and strategist, worldrenowned authority on the influence of sea power upon history, had been proclaiming to his countrymen the indispensable importance of Hawaii not only for the control of the Pacific-a dream which no American since Seward had seemed to glimpse-but, what was even more compelling, for the protection of our native shores. On May 1, 1898, Commodore George Dewey won Manila Bay. His position thereafter, strategically speaking, was critical; with Hawaii in control of a powerful enemy, it would have been untenable. The object lesson verified the observations of the expert, and June 15th the House and July 6th the Senate passed the joint resolution to annex the Islands. From imperialism in Hawaii, one turns to the larger aspects of the problem precipitated by the war with Spain. The war commenced most unexpectedly. Its consequences passed imagination. To read results as part of a deliberate plan is unhistorical, yet they harmonized with an imperialism which for years had gained a gradual momentum. THE CUBAN CRISIS President McKinley's first annual message to Congress discussed the Cuban situation with excellent tact and tone.3 The long strain upon American neutrality imposed by the Cuban insurrection of 1868 to 1878, so taxing to the diplomacy of Grant and Fish, was renewed in 1895 in aggravated form by fresh uprisings and Spain's sanguinary efforts to suppress them. The Cleveland Administration recognized Cuban insurgency but would not recognize belligerency. 3 Richardson, James D., Messages and Papers of the Presidents, X, 127-136. Congress took a more advanced position. It passed a concurrent resolution in 1896 recognizing Cuba as in a state of war and offering mediation. Such action was a repetition of the Congressional resolution in Johnson's term which, as Seward informed the French, was merely an expression of opinion in no way binding the Executive, whose sole responsibility it remained to guide negotiation. And like his predecessor, Cleveland quite ignored it. A vote in Congress nearly unanimous, however-64 to 6 in the Senate; 246 to 27 in the House-indicated a degree of public agitation over Cuba which neither Spain herself nor the incoming administration could deny. McKinley inherited both the problem and a mandate for its solution. His path was even charted in Cleveland's last annual message to Congress, which, in spite of serious reluctance to violate neutrality, declared that in the event of a continuance of atrocities and of conclusive evidence that Spanish sovereignty could not be restored, then "a situation will be presented in which our obligations to the sovereignty of Spain will be superseded by higher obligations which we can hardly hesitate to recognize and discharge." * Here was more than a hint of war. And the further protest of Secretary Sherman in June, 1897, against the horrors perpetrated by Don Valeriano Weyler, the Captain General of Cuba, in his reconcentration camps, left no doubt of rising indignation in the United States. But in October a Liberal ministry took control in Spain and removed the "Butcher" from his bloody task. When shortly afterward McKinley wrote his message, it seemed, therefore, the decent thing to give the new administration an opportunity to make good; the more so since, as the President observed, "not a single American citizen is now in arrest or confinement in Cuba of whom this government has any knowledge." In December, therefore, our Cuban purposes were peaceful. Autonomy was to have a trial in Cuba while we looked on 995 McElroy, Robert, Grover Cleveland, the Man and the Statesman, II, 248-249. 5 Richardson, James D., Messages and Papers of the Presidents, X, |