Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [246]
Ethically it seems to me that Japan owes a duty to the world at this crisis. The civilized world looks to her to make peace; the nations believe in her; let her show her leadership in matters ethical no less than matters military. The appeal is made to her in the name of all that is lofty and noble; and to this appeal I hope she will not be deaf.
The letter was wired to Tokyo, while Meyer, at Roosevelt’s insistence, kept pressuring the Tsar for further concessions. Both initiatives failed, or seemed to fail. In the absence of changed instructions, the peace conference went into recess.
ON FRIDAY, 25 August, Roosevelt shocked most of his countrymen by dropping to the floor of Long Island Sound in one of the Navy’s six new submarines, appropriately named the Plunger. He remained beneath the surface (lashed with heavy rain) long enough to watch fish swim past his window. Then, taking the controls, he essayed a few movements himself, including one which brought the ship to the surface rear end up.
Once again, he seemed to be miming, albeit unconsciously, the progress of negotiations at Portsmouth, where the issue of the indemnity had become a dead weight. The afternoon following his dive marked the low point of the conference, with Witte and Komura staring at each other in silence, smoking cigarette after cigarette, for eight minutes. Rumors spread over the weekend that the Russians were asking for their hotel bills. On Monday, Roosevelt concluded that he could do nothing more. According to Meyer, Japan’s fanatic insistence on compensation—at a scarcely conceivable 1.2 billion yen—had so enraged the Russian people that “even the peasants” supported their sovereign’s refusal to pay.
On Tuesday, 29 August, Witte suddenly placed a sheet of paper on the table. He said it contained Russia’s final concessions. They were less, not more, generous than the concessions Japan could have accepted a week before, from the hands of the Tsar. Russia would pay no indemnity. Japan might have south Sakhalin, but only if she gave up the north, “sans aucune compensation.”
Komura sat impassive. Silence grew in the room. Witte took up another piece of paper and began to tear bits off it—a habit, intolerable to Japanese sensibilities, that he had indulged throughout the conference. Eventually, Komura said in a tight voice that the Japanese government wanted to restore peace, and bring the current negotiations to an end. He consented to the division of Sakhalin and withdrew the claim for an indemnity.
Witte accepted this acceptance, and said that the island would be cut at the fiftieth degree of latitude north. The Russo-Japanese War was over.
HENRY J. FORMAN, the young reporter whom Roosevelt had permitted on board the Mayflower, had accompanied the President on a quick trip to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, earlier in the summer of 1905. The occasion had been a routine appearance before coal miners, in a parklike square cut across by ropes, like a giant spider’s web. For some extraordinary reason, as John Mitchell addressed the crowd, bound around by the ropes, it had begun to sway from side to side, in an almost hydraulic movement that gathered force frighteningly. Mitchell, sweating, begged the crowd to keep still, lest the ropes break and people be trampled to death. But the swaying continued. Alarm was visible on the faces of those in front of the speaker stand, as if they could not help themselves.
Then Roosevelt was announced. Holding up his arms to a roar of acclaim, he began to speak. Forman could not remember what he said, only that the crowd all at once “froze to attention.”
The peace the President had made possible at Portsmouth was the result of just such