Part 9
When Becker’s unscrupulous methods were exposed by Senator Reed before the Overman Committee of the United States Senate and it was shown that he had been employing a number of ex-convicts parading under assumed names as his assistants, in order to procure evidence on which to convict men summoned before him, his star began to set. In the primaries he was decisively defeated and shortly after he retired to private practice as a lawyer.
=England Threatens the United States.=--On September 7, 1916, some remarkable statements were made in the Senate by Senator Chamberlain, of Oregon, and later replied to by Senator Williams.
The moment for war had not arrived, the Presidential election was still two months off. Senators were speaking their minds concerning the arbitrary acts of England against the United States, and Senator Chamberlain, representing the great salmon and other fishing interests of the Northwest, told how they were being destroyed by the Canadian railways and other agencies. “How?” asked Mr. Chamberlain, “not by any act of Parliament of the Canadian Government, but by orders in council, pursuing the same course in Canada that the British Government pursues in England and on the high seas for the purpose of destroying not only the commerce of our own country but the commerce of any other neutral country that it sees fit to destroy.”
The Senator said: “There is absolutely too much Toryism in the Congress of the United States, both in the House and in the Senate.”
In the course of his speech, he reviewed in detail England’s aggressions and diplomatic victories over the United States, and it developed that in the most high-handed manner England was actually threatening us. Senator Jones, of Washington, being conceded the floor by his colleagues, said:
“I read the other day an extract from a letter I received from the Acting Secretary of State, in which he said this:
“‘On July 12 the department received an informal and confidential communication from the British Ambassador stating that the Canadian Government has requested him to say that =the passage of the House Bill 15839 would affect the relations of the two countries, and might cause the Canadian Government to enact retaliatory legislation=.’”
Nominally a question of issue between this country and Canada, the part that England was prepared to play in the matter was shown by the fact that the British Ambassador was acting as the agent of Canada, a British colony.
Senator Chamberlain resumed his speech, saying:
“It is the same old threat that is always made when America undertakes to assert her rights against the British Government. We do not want to get into trouble with Great Britain, nor any other country, but we do want to protect our own rights; and if in order to do it we must suffer retaliation in some other line or at some other place, why, Mr. President, let us at whatever cost make the effort to protect ourselves and let these retaliatory measures come whenever and wherever they see fit to bring them.
“Why, there are some of our friends so tender-footed and so fearful of offending the majesty of Great Britain that they do not want to retain any of these so-called retaliatory provisions in this bill; and, yet, in violation of every treaty obligation, we find that Great Britain has not only been interfering with our commerce but is doing the very things that this measure is intended to relieve against; not only blacklisting our merchants but opening and censoring our mails. Only a few days ago I got a letter from a constituent of mine inclosing a letter from his good old mother in Germany, who wrote him that she had not heard from him for months, and yet he has been writing to her every week. Why? Because on the plea of military or other necessity Great Britain is invading the mails of the United States even when addressed to neutrals or neutral countries, and taking from the mail pouches private letters and every other kind, except such as may be protected not by international law--because they violate international law--but by special agreement between that country and this; not only letters but drafts and money and papers and everything else. I have letters from a prominent man in Pennsylvania who tells me that letters containing orders to his house from neutral countries are opened, the orders taken out and sent to British manufacturing establishments, and there filled; and the Government that has done these things has the impudence, as suggested by the letter addressed to the Senator from Washington, to insist that if we enact such legislation as that proposed and which we deem necessary to protect our people and our country, she will retaliate in some way. She can not retaliate any worse than she has done, Mr. President, without law, without authority, and in violation of every national and international right.
“I know that there are Senators here who do not agree with me. I heard a distinguished gentleman say tonight that Great Britain was fighting our battles. If that be true, does she find it necessary, in fighting our battles, to destroy our commerce, to rifle our mail sacks, to take our money, to prevent our intercourse with neutrals, and to do everything or anything to our injury, whether sanctioned by the laws of nations or in spite of them?
“I get tired of hearing this, Mr. President. Until the United States has the courage that Great Britain has always had to assert her rights and dare maintain them, the United States may expect to be imposed upon. One of my reasons for advocating preparation for self-defense was to let the world know that from this time on the United States expected to protect her citizens and her country and her country’s interests at all hazards; and the very fact that she is prepared to assert those rights when occasion requires and demands is all that it will be necessary to do. She will never have to utilize her resources for war.
“Mr. President, I serve notice on the Senate now that I propose to introduce a bill at the next session of Congress embodying the provision under consideration and try to call it to the attention of the Senate, and, if necessary, to the attention of the country, and to show the country who is responsible for this base surrender of our rights to the demands of the Canadian Government. =I want to protest as loudly as I can against Sir Joseph Pope or any other Canadian official or the representatives of any other foreign Government coming over here, either to the Executive Chambers or to the Department of State or to any other department of the Government, unless duly accredited, and interfering with the enactment of laws by the American Congress that the American people feel are necessary for their protection and the protection of their commerce. I think if any American citizen ever dared to enter upon such a course without an invitation, there ought to be some way found to punish him for attempting to interfere with the legislation proposed by a foreign government in its own way and for its own purposes.=”
Was the Senator, in the closing sentence, referring to any particular American citizen--to a citizen acting as the attorney for a foreign government and sustaining close relations to a distinguished member of the Cabinet?
On September 7 Senator Williams, of Mississippi, undertook to defend the Canadian Government, and incidentally described a hypothetical condition which eventually became a reality as to the German element--that of their children killing the children of their kin, against which, as to Canada, Williams forefended with religious protestations.
Mr. WILLIAMS. Mr. President, there is just one thing that even my friend George Chamberlain cannot do. He cannot create war between us and the men and the women and the children of Canada. =We are too near akin to one another in blood and in language and in literature and in law and in everything else that makes men and women akin to one another for that.=
=The greatest crime that the world could possibly witness would be a war between the people of the United States and the people of Canada. It is unthinkable from a sane man’s standpoint, no matter what happens, no matter what occurs....=
The Senator says that we assert and we dare to maintain our rights. Of course we do. =So do they assert and so do they dare maintain their rights, and they are weaker than we.= All the more reason why we should be considerate in our treatment of them, and by God’s blessing we are going to be. We are not hunting retaliation with Canada, either from her ports or from ours. We are seeking nothing except justice in the world.
There is one more thing to be said, Mr. President. A pathway of commercial retaliation is a pathway of war. In the long run it means that. It can not mean anything else. What we want is the old Democratic standpoint of the utmost free-trade relations with everybody on the earth. The utmost they grant us we ought to grant them. That spells peace; that spells amity; that spells friendship. The opposite course spells war in the long run, and to attempt to convert these 3,000 miles of boundary between us and Canada into an area of retaliation and trade hostility is to convert it ultimately into a relationship of war.
I, for one, have been opposed to it all the time, and I am opposed to it now. =I can not conceive of a greater crime than having our children kill the children of the Canadians or have their children kill our children in an absolutely useless species of hostility. If we start with trade hostilities, we will wind up with warlike hostilities.=
Senator Williams was one of the foremost in defending Great Britain and inciting to war with Germany. Senator Chamberlain had said that there was entirely too much Toryism in the Senate as well as in the House; but though he had mentioned no names, the Toryism of which he had referred stood self-revealed the next day.
=France’s Friendship for the United States.=--The “French and Indian wars” with which the American settlers had to contend in the early history of the colonies long antedated the Revolution, and massacres were instigated by French policy of conquest and retaliation. In the Revolution a number of patriotic Frenchmen, nursing a long grievance against France’s ancient enemy, England, saw opportunity to enfeeble their country’s hated rival. Encouraged by Frederick the Great, who had a score to settle with England for the treachery which Bute had practiced against him in paying secret subsidies to Frederick’s enemy, Austria, while England was allied with him, by heroic efforts they succeeded in sending succor to the colonies in the form of troops (many of them Germans) under Lafayette. This is so well understood that the American historian, Benson J. Lossing, specifically points out in his writings what he calls the “superstition” that we owe our “being as a nation to the generosity of the French monarch and the gallantry of French warriors.” Revealing the motives that governed France, he writes:
In the Seven Years War, which ended with the treaty of 1763, France had been thoroughly humbled by England. Her pride had been wounded. She had been shorn of vast possessions in America and Asia. She had been compelled, by the terms of the treaty, to cast down the fortifications of Dunkirk and to submit forever to the presence of an English commissioner, without whose consent not a single paving stone might be moved on the quay or in the harbor of a French maritime city. This was an insult too grievous to be borne with equanimity. Its keenness was maintained by the tone of English diplomacy, which was that of a conqueror--harsh, arrogant, and often uncivil. A desire for relief from the shame became a vital principle of French policy, =and the most sleepless vigilance was maintained for the discovery of an opportunity to avenge the injury and efface the mortification=.
The quarrel between Great Britain and her colonies, which rapidly assumed the phase of contest after the port of Boston was closed, early in the summer of 1774, attracted the notice and stimulated the hope of the French government. But it seemed hardly possible for a few colonists to hold a successful or even effective contest with powerful England--“the mistress of the seas;” and it was not until the proceedings of the First Continental Congress had been read in Europe, the skirmish at Lexington and the capture of Ticonderoga had occurred, and the Second Congress had met, thrown down the gauntlet of defiance at the feet of the British ministry and been proclaimed to be “rebels” that the French cabinet saw gleams of sure promise that England’s present trouble would be sufficiently serious to give France the coveted opportunity to strike her a damaging blow.
Lossing sums up our debt to France in the following words:
That all assistance was afforded, primarily, as a part of a State policy for the benefit of France;
That the French people as such never assisted the Americans; for the French democracy did not comprehend the nature of the struggle, and had no opportunity for expression, and the aristocracy, like the government, had no sympathy with their cause;
That the first and most needed assistance was from a French citizen (Beaumarchais), favored by his government for State purposes, who hoped to help himself and his government;
That, with the exception of the services of Lafayette and a few other Frenchmen, at all times, and those of the army under Rochambeau, and the navy under De Grasse, for a few weeks in the seventh year of the struggle, the Americans derived no material aid from the French;
That the moral support offered by the alliance was injurious because it was more than counterpoised by the relaxation of effort and vigilance which a reliance upon others is calculated to inspire, and the creation of hopes which were followed by disappointment;
That the advantages gained by the French over the English, because of their co-operation with the Americans, were equivalent to any which the Americans acquired by the alliance;
That neither party then rendered assistance to the other because of any good will mutually existing, but as a means of securing mutual benefits; and
That the Americans would doubtless have secured their independence and peace sooner without their entanglements with the French than with it.
A candid consideration of these facts, in the light of present knowledge on the subject, compels us to conclude that there is no debt of gratitude due from Americans to France for services in securing their independence of Great Britain which is not cancelled by the services done by the Americans at the same time in securing for France important advantages over Great Britain. And when we consider these facts and the conduct of the French toward us during a large portion of the final decade of the last century, and of the decade of this just closed--=the hostile attitude, in our national infancy, of the inflated Directory, sustained by the French people, and the equally hostile attitude, in the hour of our greatest national distress, of the imperial cabinet, also sustained by the French people, Americans cannot be expected to endure with absolute complacency the egotism which untruthfully asserts that they owe their existence as a nation to the generosity and valor of the French=.
Though President Wilson brought back from Paris a treaty of alliance between the United States, England and France, which he asked the Senate, on July 29, 1919, to ratify, and declared that “we are bound to France by ties of friendship which we have always regarded and shall always regard as peculiarly sacred,” he stated in a much earlier work, “The State,” that though the Congress at Philadelphia had explicitly commanded Franklin, Adams and Jay, the American commissioners, to be guided by the wishes of the French court in the peace negotiations, “it proved impracticable, nevertheless, to act with France; for she conducted herself, not as the ingenuous friend of the United States, but only as the enemy of England, and, as first and always, a subtle strategist for her own interests and advantage. The American commissioners were not tricked, and came to terms separately with the English.”
Having accomplished the object of giving aid in humbling England through the loss of her colonies, the French, far from remaining our friends, became our enemies, and from 1797 to 1835 we find the messages of the Presidents abounding in complaints of the treatment France was according our young merchant marine on the high seas. In 1798 we found ourselves in a state of war with France. “Such an outburst had not been known,” says the historian, Elson, “since the Battle of Lexington.” Patriotic songs were written, and one of these, “Hail, Columbia,” still lives in our literature. Washington was again called to the command of the American army, but beyond some engagements at sea, no blows were actually struck.
But ere long France was again at her old tricks. In 1851 we were on the eve of war over the Hawaiian Islands, which France had seized, though knowing that she could never hold them save as the result of a successful war. On June 18, 1851, Secretary of State Webster instructed the American minister in Paris to say that the further enforcement of the French demands against Hawaii “would tend seriously to disturb our friendly relations with the French government.”
The third conspicuous instance of France’s persistent enmity to us was at a time when President Lincoln was harrassed by the distressing events of the most critical hours of the rebellion and the possibility of England and France together undertaking the cause of the Confederacy. England had been approached by the Emperor, Napoleon III, with a proposal for an alliance, and in both countries the Union cause was at its lowest ebb.
Justin McCarthy in his “History of Our Own Times” (II, p. 231) says: “The Southern scheme found support only in England and in France. In all other European countries the sympathy of the people and government alike went with the North.... Assurances of friendship came from all civilized countries to the Northern States except from England and France alone.”
While the Northern and Southern States were engaged in a death grapple, Napoleon III was defying the Monroe Doctrine by invading Mexico, and in 1862 was sending instructions to the French general, Forey, as follows:
People will ask you why we sacrifice men and money to establish a government in Mexico. In the present state of civilization the development of America can no longer be a matter of indifference to Europe.... =It is not at all to our interest that they should come in possession of the entire Gulf of Mexico, to rule from there the destinies of the Antilles and South America, and control the products of the New World.=
After Lee’s surrender General Slaughter of the Confederate army opened negotiations with the French Marshal Bazaine for the transfer of 25,000 Confederate soldiers to Mexico, and many distinguished Confederate officers cast their lot with the French to establish Maximilian on the throne. General Price was commissioned to recruit an imperial army in the Confederate States. Governor Harris of Tennessee and other Americans naturalized as Mexicans and now took the lead in a colonization scheme of vast proportions. The North became thoroughly alarmed. A French army co-operating with Confederate expatriates could not be tolerated on the Mexican border.
The government at Washington lodged an emphatic protest with the French government, and an army of observation of 50,000 men under General Sheridan was dispatched to the Rio Grande, ready to cross into Mexico and attack Bazaine at a moment’s notice. =The American minister in Paris was instructed by Seward to insist on a withdrawal of the French forces from Mexico, and as the French government was in no position to engage in a war in a distant country against a veteran army of a million men it was forced to yield.=
“The Emperor of the French,” writes McCarthy (p. 231), “fully believed that the Southern cause was sure to triumph, and that the Union would be broken up; he was even willing to hasten what he assumed to be the unavoidable end. He was anxious that England should join with him in some measures to facilitate the success of the South by recognizing the Government of the Southern Confederation. He got up the Mexican intervention, which assuredly he would never have attempted if he had not been persuaded that the Union was on the eve of disruption.”
The French populace was enthusiastically on the side of Napoleon in the Mexican adventure, as attested by the proceedings in the French legislature, especially by the scenes in the Senate, February 24, 1862, and in the Corps Legislatif, June 26 of the same year, when Billault, Minister of Foreign Affairs, spoke on French aims in Mexico. On March 23, 1865, Druyn de Lluys, the French Premier, notified Mr. Seward, our Secretary of State, that American intervention in favor of Juarez, the Mexican patriot, =would lead to a declaration of war on the part of France=. The necessary military preparations had been made by Marshal Bazaine, who, as related by Paul Garlot in “L’Empire de Maximilian” (Paris, 1890), had erected “fortified supports” at the United States frontier and made certain “arrangements” with Confederate leaders.
=“In our dark hours and the great convulsions of our war,” said Charles Sumner, then chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations in the Senate, in New York, September 11, 1863, “France is forgetting her traditions.”=
=Benjamin Franklin.=--In his pointed comments on the disfavor with which practical politicians regard the independent voter in politics, Prof. A. B. Faust, of Cornell University, in his valuable work, “The German Element in the United States,” says of conditions in Pennsylvania preceding the Revolution: “The Germans, with few exceptions, could not be relied upon either by demagogues or by astute party men to vote consistently with their party organization. The politician catering to the German vote often found himself strangely deceived. He never expected that the German might think for himself and vote as seemed right to him. The politician in his wrath would declare the Germans politically incapable. From his point of view they were un-American. They did not cling to one party. The fact of the matter is, they were independent voters, and they appeared as such at a very early period. Benjamin Franklin made the discovery before the Revolutionary War, and he was provoked to an extent surprising in that suave diplomatist.” In a letter to Peter Collinson, dated Philadelphia, May 9, 1753, Franklin says:
I am perfectly of your mind that measures of great temper are necessary with the Germans, and am not without apprehension that through their indiscretion, or ours, or both, great disorders may one day among us.