This resentful view of the Senate's action was natural enough at the time, but to-day it is possible to interpret what happened more charitably. The treaty was a novel departure in international affairs and very broad. It has been well said that our Constitution requires the Executive to lead in such matters and imposes upon the Senate the duty of keeping it from leading too fast for public opinion. Treaties depend more completely than do domestic laws on the sanction and support of the popular will. Public opinion is not clear about arbitration to-day, and it is obvious now that it was very little prepared in 1897. It would have accepted the treaty — of that there was no doubt - but it did not care enough to insist that it must be ratified. Unlike leaders of the Roosevelt and Lloyd George school, who combine diplomacy with direct appeals to popular interest, Olney and Cleveland did almost nothing to enlighten the public mind and to enlist popular backing before committing themselves to a policy. They tried to take a long stride in the first step. Less ambitious attempts that have been made with better success since have shown that it is well to exclude explicitly for the present, at any rate- all disputes which involve national honor and integrity. These have come to be spoken of, indeed, as the "non-arbitrable" or "non-judiciable" cases. It is true that Olney expected a reasonable construction of the word "rights"- to confine the agreement to legal disputes, and thus to exclude questions of national honor and integrity; and that he also believed no reasonable interpretation of the word "rights" could possibly oblige the United States to submit the Monroe Doctrine to a

tribunal; but it was too much to ask the Senate to trust the country's future to mere interpretation. Perhaps it would have been unwise to rely on interpretation in such vital matters anyhow. International conferences usually prove to persons who attend them that men of different nations have dissimilar mental habits and different ways of reasoning, and interpretation depends on reasoning. A more important point was probably the fact that the Olney treaty would have operated to send every dispute about "rights" to arbitration without any further action ad hoc by the Senate. In this it differed from the Root treaties of 1908, and from the Knox treaties which were drawn upon Mr. Root's model. Those all contained a provision which made each particular reference to arbitration dependent upon the Senate's advice and consent. The practical importance of the difference is easily seen, for if an arbitration programme is to be applied or ignored at the Senate's pleasure it may well come to very little. Mr. Root's theory was, seemingly, that it would be wise to build up public opinion by establishing a vague presumption in favor of arbitration, and a procedure, at the price of every certainty that it would be resorted to. By this policy he clearly conceded a precedent to the Senate which that body will be slow to relinquish. Olney's more heroic purpose was to carry arbitration across the Senate bar once and for all. Which was the better way, in the long view of things, will always be discussible, and will probably depend for an answer on how each one inclines to resolve the Protean question, whether it is better to sail out of harbor immediately, though in ballast, or to fight wind and

tide with a full cargo. Olney never lost faith in the wisdom of his own project, as may be seen in an interesting paper on general arbitration treaties which he contributed to the "American Journal of International Law" for July, 1912.1

But what Cleveland and Olney did must be recognized none the less as a valuable diplomatic achievement. To commit Her Majesty's Government and the Executive Department of our Government to so complete a project was to lift arbitration out of the realm of academic discussion and make it a matter of practical politics. This marked a considerable gain. The episode added vigor to the movement for arbitration and nourished discussion. It helped to clarify the difficulties, the dangers, and the possibilities too; and made it easier for others to secure some definite results.

1 See Appendix V.

XIII

CUBA AND SPAIN

HE Venezuelan affair was a sudden thunderhead

TH

in the heavens; but after rumbling out a couple of formidable-sounding mutterings, it passed away and left an atmosphere in which American diplomacy could draw its breath more easily and confidently than ever before. Cuba, by contrast, was a sultry storm-center on the line of the southern horizon, from which a cloud was spreading slowly but steadily and ever more darkly across the sky during the whole of the two years in which Olney was Secretary of State. Poor Cuba- and poor Spain too— was always with him.

When the Island's chronic discontent with Spanish misrule flared out into a new insurrection a few weeks before he became Secretary of State, the revolt was immediately reinforced by an active propaganda in the States, and by the more or less illegal shipment from the States of the wherewithal to carry on the struggle. American sympathy was generally with the rebels and began to assume the form of popular resentment against Spain and popular impatience over her harsh presence in the Antilles. But no cool head yet considered American intervention — and war with Spain as its probable accompaniment — as immediately thinkable. So the Administration's delicate part was to see that American sympathizers with Cuba respected Spain's rights and prerogatives in their actions if not in thought and speech.

In the discharge of this duty, it often seemed as if not only the insurrectos, but also the American public and Congress, were intent upon adding to its difficulties as much as they could, and Spain appeared to be less and less able to put an end to the trouble.

With regard to the public's attitude, Rear Admiral Chadwick has painted the picture in a few just strokes:

A great democracy, the education of whose mass usually ends with the public school, and whose library, later, is the newspaper, does not reason with a volume of international law in its hand or trouble itself, if the question takes form in its mind at all, with what seem to it minor distinctions which weigh not at all with its prejudices and sympathies. For a hundred years the American democracy had been in antagonistic contact with Spanish rule in Louisiana, in Florida, in Mexico, and it knew but one mode of settlement of the difficulties which had thus arisen; a mode which had swept Spanish authority from huge empires of territory which constitute to-day more than half the dominion of the Union. At the same time it had seen the same authority driven from the remainder of North America and from the whole of South America. It was to be expected that in such a question as that of Cuba, its base of reasoning would be the inherited views of these many generations, and that its starting-point would be that Spain was in the wrong. When to this was added the destruction of a great commerce, and a daily account, too often in overlurid form, of Cuban happenings, but which frequently in the calmest statement was deeply harrowing, it was impossible that American popular sympathy should not go to a people fighting for relief from a political system which some thoughtful Spaniards themselves believed unbearable.1

1 Chadwick, The Relations of the United States and Spain - Diplomacy (Scribners, 1909), 432.