of peace and justice
and fair play.

The secret of Roosevelt's success in foreign affairs is to be found in
another of his favorite sayings: "Nine-tenths of wisdom is to be wise in
time." He has himself declared that his whole foreign policy "was
based on the exercise of intelligent foresight and of decisive action
sufficiently far in advance of any likely crisis to make it improbable
that we would run into serious trouble."

When Roosevelt became President, a perplexing controversy with Great
Britain over the boundary line between Alaska and Canada was in full
swing. The problem, which had become acute with the discovery of gold in
the Klondike in 1897, had already been considered, together with eleven
other subjects of dispute between Canada and the United States, by a
Joint Commission which had been able to reach no agreement. The essence
of the controversy was this: The treaty of 1825 between Great Britain
and Russia had declared that the boundary, dividing British and Russian
America on that five-hundred-mile strip of land which depends from the
Alaskan elephant's head like a dangling halter rope, should be drawn
"parallel to the windings of the coast" at a distance inland of thirty
miles. The United States took the plain and literal interpretation of
these words in the treaty. The Canadian contention was that within the
meaning of the treaty the fiords or inlets which here break into the
land were not part of the sea, and that the line, instead of following,
at the correct distance inland, the indentations made by these arms of
the sea, should leap boldly across them, at the agreed distance from
the points of the headlands. This would give Canada the heads of several
great inlets and direct access to the sea far north of the point where
the Canadian coast had, always been assumed to end. Canada and the
United States were equally resolute in upholding their claims. It looked
as if the matter would end in a deadlock.

John Hay, who had been Secretary of State in McKinley's Cabinet, as
he now was in Roosevelt's, had done his best to bring the matter to a
settlement, but had been unwilling to have the dispute arbitrated, for
the very good reason that, as he said, "although our claim is as clear
as the sun in heaven, we know enough of arbitration to foresee the fatal
tendency of all arbitrators to compromise." Roosevelt believed that the
"claim of the Canadians for access to deep water along any part of the
Alaskan