we should mind our own business. But they agreed
with us in the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty that both should build and run the
canal. Vagueness about territory near by raised further trouble, and
there we were in the right. England yielded. The years went on and we
grew, until the time came when we decided that if there was to be any
canal, no one but ourselves should have it. We asked to be let off
the old treaty. England let us off, stipulating the canal should be
unfortified, and an "open door" to all. Our representative agreed to
this, much to our displeasure. Indeed, I do not think he should have
agreed to it. Did England hold us to it? All this happened in the
lifetime of many of us, and we know that she did not hold us to it. She
gave us what we asked, and she did so because she felt its justice, and
that it in no way menaced her with injury. All this began in 1850 and
ended, as we know, in the time of Roosevelt.

About 1887 our seal-fishing in the Behring Sea brought on an acute
situation. Into the many and intricate details of this, I need not
go; you can find them in any good encyclopedia, and also in Harper's
Magazine for April, 1891, and in other places. Our fishing clashed with
Canada's. We assumed jurisdiction over the whole of the sea, which is a
third as big as the Mediterranean, on the quite fantastic ground that it
was an inland sea. Ignoring the law that nobody has jurisdiction outside
the three-mile limit from their shores, we seized Canadian vessels sixty
miles from land. In fact, we did virtually what we had gone to war with
England for doing in 1812. But England did not go to war. She asked for
arbitration. Throughout this, our tone was raw and indiscreet, while
hers was conspicuously the opposite; we had done an unwarrantable and
high-handed thing; our claim that Behring Sea was an "inclosed" sea was
abandoned; the arbitration went against us, and we paid damages for the
Canadian vessels.

In 1895, in the course of a century's dispute over the boundary between
Venezuela and British Guiana, Venezuela took prisoner some British
subjects, and asked us to protect her from the consequences. Richard
Olney, Grover Cleveland's Secretary of State, informed Lord Salisbury,
Prime Minister of England, that "in accordance with the Monroe Doctrine,
the United States must insist on arbitration"--that is, of the disputed
boundary. It was an abrupt extension of the Monroe Doctrine. It was
dictating to England the man