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By Root 1067 0

which other national energies were bursting old limits, this happy condition gave no great promise of permanence. On July 20, when Salisbury’s Government was less than a month old, it was suddenly and surprisingly challenged from an unexpected quarter, the United States. The affair concerned a long-disputed frontier between British Guiana and Venezuela. Claiming that the British were expanding territorially at their expense in violation of the Monroe Doctrine, the Venezuelans had been goading the United States to open that famous umbrella and insist on arbitration. Although the American President, Grover Cleveland, was a man of ordinarily sound judgment and common sense, his countrymen were in a mood of swelling self-assertion and, as Rudyard Kipling pointed out, for purposes of venting chauvinist sentiments, France had Germany, Britain had Russia, and America had Britain, the only feasible country “for the American public speaker to trample upon.” On July 20, Cleveland’s Secretary of State, Richard Olney, delivered a Note to Great Britain stating that disregard of the Monroe Doctrine would be “deemed an act of unfriendliness toward the United States,” whom he described in terms of not very veiled belligerence as “master of the situation and practically invulnerable against any and all comers.”

This was truly astonishing language for diplomatic usage; but it was deliberately provocative on Olney’s part, because, as he said, “in English eyes the United States was then so completely a negligible quantity” that he felt “only words the equivalent of blows would be effective.” Upon Lord Salisbury who was acting as his own Foreign Secretary they failed of effect. He was no more disposed to respond to this kind of prodding than he would have been if his tailor had suddenly challenged him to a duel. Foreign policy had been his métier for twenty years. He had been at the Congress of Berlin with Disraeli in 1878 and had maneuvered through all the twists and turns of that perennial entanglement, the Eastern Question. His method was not that of Lord Palmerston, whom the Prince of Wales admired because he “knew his own mind and put down his foot.” Issues in foreign affairs were no longer as forthright as in the days of Lord Palmerston’s flourishing, and Lord Salisbury sought no dramatic successes in their conduct. The victories of diplomacy, he said, were won by “a series of microscopic advantages; a judicious suggestion here, an opportune civility there, a wise concession at one moment and a farsighted persistence at another; of sleepless tact, immovable calmness and patience that no folly, no provocation, no blunder can shake.” But he regarded these refinements as wasted on a democracy like the United States, just as he regarded the vote as too good for the working class. He simply let Olney’s note go unanswered for four months.

When he finally replied on November 26 it was to remark coldly that “the disputed frontier of Venezuela has nothing to do with any of the questions dealt with by President Monroe” and to refuse flatly to arbitrate “the frontier of a British possession which belonged to the Throne of England before the Republic of Venezuela came into existence.” He did not even bother to obey diplomacy’s primary rule: leave room for negotiation. The rebuff was too much even for Cleveland. In a Message to Congress on December 17 he announced that after an American Committee of Inquiry had investigated and established a boundary line, any British extension over the line would be regarded as “wilful aggression” upon the rights and interests of the United States. Cleveland became a hero; a tornado of jingoism swept the country; “WAR IF NECESSARY,” proclaimed the New York Sun. The word “war” was soon being used as recklessly as if it concerned an expedition against the Iroquois or the Barbary pirates.

Britain was amazed, with opinion dividing according to party. The Liberals were mortified by Lord Salisbury’s haughty tone, the Tories angered at American presumption. “No Englishman with imperial instincts,” wrote the Tory journalist