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 forgot