CHAPTER XV

HE ESTABLISHES HIMSELF AND HIS COUNTRY AS A WORLD POWER

THE

HE President returned to Washington early in June and plunged once more into the turmoil of his administrative duties. Corruption had been brought to light in the Post Office Department, and the Postmaster-General, though eager to end it, was nervous about the effect the exposure might have on the fortunes of the Republican party. Roosevelt insisted on absolute publicity and relentless justice wherever the trail might lead. The trail happened to lead to high quarters. Politicians appealed frantically to Roosevelt to keep the scandals quiet. The President made it clear that if he were going to preach clean government he would have a clean house of his own.

Affairs at home and abroad alternately demanded his attention. Not only in the Post Office Department was corruption revealed. He discovered that frauds on a huge scale had been practised in the distribution of public lands and in the execution of the immigration laws, and set the wheels of justice moving.

Meanwhile, early in July, a report reached him that the American vice-consul at Beirut, Turkey, had been murdered. Instantly, he sent a squadron to the scene of the supposed crime, to support the American minister in his demand for satisfaction. Europe gasped and timid folk in America shuddered. The consul, as it turned out, had been attacked, but not killed. The Turkish government was profuse

HE LAUGHS BEST WHO LAUGHS LAST

THE DEMOCRATIC DONKEY: "Ha, hal the cat is out of the bag."

THE STRENUOUS REPUBLICAN BOY: "Yes, but it will soon be a dead cat."

in its expressions of regret, and suddenly showed a willingness to accede to certain long-standing requests concerning American missionaries. The squadron sailed away. No blood had been shed, but Europe had a new respect for American citizenship.

Straightforward, vigorous, unafraid toward the nations without and the conflicting groups within, Roosevelt appeared to the critical gaze of the Old

World like some hero out of legendry, slashing with his broadsword and ringed by the bodies of his foes. He was a storm-center always. He appointed a negro to office in Charleston, and the South raged, while Boston applauded in pious horror at narrowminded Carolina; he appointed a negro, thereupon, to office in Boston, and Boston fumed, while the South shook in boisterous delight. He reinstated in a government place a non-union man discharged at the request of a union, and stood firm while labor leaders vociferously protested; he rebuked the heads of corporations with stinging words and gritted his teeth grimly while the ensuing editorial tempest passed over his head.

On the 20th of October the Alaska Commission, sitting in London, gave its verdict in favor of America, the British member having voted with the Americans against the two Canadians on every important issue. The result completely justified Roosevelt's brusque assertions in January.

Less than two weeks later he was confronted overnight with an international issue of far greater significance.

For years negotiations had been pending regarding an interoceanic canal in Nicaragua or Panama. The political complications in the way were huge, for not only the Central American republics of Colombia and Nicaragua, through whose territory the canal might run, were involved, but France and England likewise; for a French company had spent hundreds of millions in a vain attempt to construct a canal at Panama, and had on the spot some forty million

dollars worth of concessions and machinery for which it wanted three times the value; and England had an old treaty with the United States for the joint construction of a canal. After years of wise diplomacy and fierce and discouraging struggles with the Senate, Secretary Hay had ironed out most of the difficulties. The French company had agreed to sell out at $40,000,000; England had consented to abrogate the Clayton-Bulwer treaty. Congress, after endless wrangles, had eliminated consideration of the Nicaragua route and decided on a canal through the Isthmus of Panama.

Nothing now remained but to make the necessary treaty with Colombia.

But here the real difficulty arose, for Colombia was in a chronic state of revolution, passing from the control of one set of bandits only to fall into the hands of another.

"You could no more make an agreement with the Colombian rulers," exclaimed Roosevelt later, “than you could nail currant jelly to a wall-and the failure to nail currant jelly to a wall is not due to the nail; it is due to the currant jelly."

During 1903 Colombia was under the dictatorship of an adventurer named Marroquin, who, as Vice-President, had succeeded to the Presidency by clapping the President into jail and then announcing that "in the absence of the President he would fulfil his constitutional duties." Marroquin and his friends saw in the desire of the United States to construct a canal at Panama a dazzling prospect of enormous loot. Marroquin proposed a treaty