Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

342

MEMOIRS OF AN EDITOR

dictated to our correspondent at Albany, and then corrected with his own pen, his first pronouncement upon a
question in which, later, his official influence at Washington was to be decisive:
I most earnestly hope that the pending treaty concerning
the Isthmian Canal will not be ratified, unless amended so as
to provide that the canal when built shall be wholly under the
control of the United States alike in peace and war. This seems
to me vital, no less from the standpoint of our sea power than
from the standpoint of the Monroe Doctrine.
The Sun was leading in the press the fight against the
first Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, and Colonel Roosevelt's
emphatic protest aided greatly in defeating.that instrument by means of the Senate amendments which the
British Government was unwilling to accept. It is to the
everlasting honor of John Hay, who had negotiated the
treaty as Ambassador to the Court of Saint James's and
was then secretary of state at Washington under the McKinley administration, that though he was hugely disappointed and for some time, as it seems, particularly aggrieved at The Sun's behavior he neither sulked nor withdrew from the game but went to work with all his wit
and wisdom to procure a new convention project that
should be satisfactory to both parties. And it fell to his
friend Roosevelt, by that time in the White House, to
send to the Senate this second Hay-Pauncefote Treaty,
and to proclaim it when ratified, with the American right
to fortify covered. But the question of route was open.
Both Nicaragua and Panama had their advocates on
political and technical grounds. The preponderance of
American opinion, however, as well as of American politi

cal and capitalistic influence, was for the more northerly
route. The Sun was almost alone among American newspapers. Sentimbnt in the United States very generally
favored the idea of a canal that should be American from