Roosevelt capable of seeking an opportunity for plunging the country into a foreign war merely to gratify his ambition or to give play to his fighting spirit. But I do think that whenever there are two ways of deciding a matter of controversy—one the slow, patient, diplomatic, peaceable way, and the other the short cut by the use of force—Mr. Roosevelt will be temperamentally inclined to choose the short cut, and it will require with him an uncommonly strong effort of self-restraint to resist that inclination, which effort, if made at all, is not always successful.
The Panama affair is a case in point. Well-nigh everybody in this country desired the building of an inter-oceanic canal. Congress passed an act, the so-called Spooner act of June 28, 1902, authorizing the President to negotiate for the acquisition of the property of the Panama Canal Company and for the control of the necessary territory of the republic of Colombia on which that property was situated, and directing the President, if he should fail in making the desired arrangements upon reasonable terms, then to negotiate for the acquisition of the necessary territory in Costa Rica and Nicaragua for the building of the so-called Nicaragua Canal. The President accordingly made a treaty with the republic of Colombia, the so-called Hay-Herran Treaty, which was subject to the approval of the Senate of the republic of Colombia, as well as of our own. Our Senate approved but the Senate of Colombia rejected that treaty. Thereupon, President Roosevelt did not, as the law expressly commanded him, enter into negotiations for the building of the Nicaragua Canal, but, when a so-called “revolution” broke out in the state of Panama, declaring its secession from the republic of Colombia, of which it formed constitutionally a part, just as the States of New York and Pennsylvania form parts of the United States,
