lared,
"the Republic, without any impediment, will be able to contract and will
be in more clear, more definite and more advantageous possession, both
legally and materially." The naked meaning of this was that Colombia
proposed to wait a year, and then enforce a forfeiture of the rights and
property of the French Panama Company, so as to secure the forty million
dollars our Government had authorized as payment to this company. If we
had sat supine, this would doubtless have meant that France would have
interfered to protect the company, and we should then have had on the
Isthmus, not the company, but France; and the gravest international
complications might have ensued. Every consideration of international
morality and expediency, of duty to the Panama people, and of
satisfaction of our own national interests and honor, bade us take
immediate action. I recognized Panama forthwith on behalf of the United
States, and practically all the countries of the world immediately
followed suit. The State Department immediately negotiated a canal
treaty with the new Republic. One of the foremost men in securing the
independence of Panama, and the treaty which authorized the United
States forthwith to build the canal, was M. Philippe Bunau-Varilla, an
eminent French engineer formerly associated with De Lesseps and then
living on the Isthmus; his services to civilization were notable, and
deserve the fullest recognition.

From the beginning to the end our course was straightforward and in
absolute accord with the highest of standards of international morality.
Criticism of it can come only from misinformation, or else from a
sentimentality which represents both mental weakness and a moral twist.
To have acted otherwise than I did would have been on my part betrayal
of the interests of the United States, indifference to the interests of
Panama, and recreancy to the interests of the world at large. Colombia
had forfeited every claim to consideration; indeed, this is not stating
the case strongly enough: she had so acted that yielding to her would
have meant on our part that culpable form of weakness which stands on a
level with wickedness. As for me personally, if I had hesitated to act,
and had not in advance discounted the clamor of those Americans who have
made a fetish of disloyalty to their country, I should have esteemed
myself as deserving a place in Dante's inferno beside the faint-hearted
cleric who was guilty of "il gran rif