e, were
confined to Manchuria, and Japan promised that her occupation of that
province should be temporary and that commercial opportunity therein
should be the same for all. The culmination of American prestige came
with President Roosevelt's offer of the good offices of the United
States, on June 8, 1905. As a result, peace negotiations were
concluded in the Treaty of Portsmouth (New Hampshire) in 1905. For
this conspicuous service to the cause of peace President Roosevelt was
awarded the Nobel prize.

Secretary Hay had therefore, in the seven years following the real
arrival of the United States in the Far East, evolved a policy which was
clear and definite, and one which appealed to the American people.
While it constituted a variation from the precise methods laid down
by President Monroe in 1823, in that it involved concerted and equal
cooperation with the great powers of the world, Hay's policy rested upon
the same fundamental bases: a belief in the fundamental right of nations
to determine their own government, and the reduction to a minimum
of intervention by foreign powers. To have refused to recognize
intervention at all would have been, under the circumstances, to abandon
China to her fate. In protecting its own right to trade with her, the
United States protected the integrity of China. Hay had, moreover, so
ably conducted the actual negotiations that the United States enjoyed
for the moment the leadership in the concert of powers and exercised
an authority more in accord with her potential than with her actual
strength. Secretary Hay's death in 1905 brought American leadership
to an end, for, though his policies continued to be avowed by all
concerned, their application was thereafter restricted. The integrity of
Chinese territory was threatened, though not actually violated, by
the action of Great Britain in Tibet and of Japan in Manchuria. Japan,
recognized as a major power since her war with Russia, seemed in the
opinion of many to leave but a crack of the door open in Manchuria, and
her relationship with the United States grew difficult as she resented
more and more certain discriminations against her citizens which
she professed to find in the laws of some of the American States,
particularly in those of California.

In 1908 Elihu Root, who succeeded Hay as Secretary of State, effected
an understanding with Japan. Adopting a method which has become rather
habitual in the relationship between the Uni