Page:Men of Mark in America vol 1.djvu/59

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JOHN HAY
25

the loss of any of our commercial rights and privileges in the islands we secured the finest harbor in the South Seas.

During the same period Mr. Hay was actively engaged in efforts to induce the various powers to adopt the commercial policy of reciprocity. His influence upon the Universal Peace Congress at the Hague in 1899, through the delegates from this country, was so pronounced as to secure in its permanent records an emphatic statement of the Monroe Doctrine as it is held in the United States.

Among other creditable achievements of Mr. Hay was the settlement, in 1901, of the troubles with Turkey which had grown out of the Armenian riots. He secured a payment by the Turkish Government of $95,000 for injuries received and losses sustained by the American missionaries and citizens, together with the restoration of the devastated mission and the enlargement of Robert college at Constantinople.

At the outbreak of war between Russia and Japan, in the early part of 1904, the American secretary again manifested his genius for high diplomacy by securing an agreement from the powers to confine the area of hostilities to the territory of the belligerents, thus preventing what threatened to be a general European war, which might have involved the United States.

Mr. Hay was married February 4, 1874, to Clara L., daughter of Amasa and Julia A. (Gleason) Stone. They have had two sons and two daughters. The elder son, Adelbert Stone, born in 1876, was graduated from Yale in 1898. He became secretary of legation under his father in London, and continued to act as his father's secretary for some time after their return to America. Subsequently he made a trip around the world in an official capacity, and afterward participated in the Philippine campaign, displaying great courage in several hotly-contested engagements. In December, 1899, he became United States Consul at Pretoria, South Africa, which position he held until the spring of 1901, and in which, although the youngest of the resident consuls, he manifested so high an order of diplomatic talent as to make him practically their leader and to justify the confident expectation of a distinguished career. When he returned to this country he became the private secretary of President McKinley. In June, 1901, while attending a reunion of his class at Yale he lost his life as the result of an accidental fall. Helen, the elder of the two daughters, has manifested poetic talent,