controversialists avoided.  The statement that the United States had built the Canal with its own money and its own genius, that it had achieved a great success where other nations had achieved a great failure, and that it had the right of passing its own ships through its own highway without assessing tolls—­this was apparently argument enough.  When Great Britain protested the exemption as a violation of the Treaty, there were not lacking plenty of elements in American politics and journalism to denounce her as committing an act of high-handed impertinence, as having intruded herself in matters which were not properly her concern, and as having attempted to rob the American public of the fruits of its own enterprise.  That animosity to Great Britain, which is always present in certain parts of the hyphenated population, burst into full flame.

Clear as were the legal aspects of the dispute, the position of the Wilson Administration was a difficult one.  The Irish-American elements, which have specialized in making trouble between the United States and Great Britain, represented a strength to the Democratic Party in most large cities.  The great mass of Democratic Senators and Congressmen had voted for the exemption bill.  The Democratic platform of 1912 had endorsed this same legislation.  This declaration was the handiwork of Senator O’Gorman, of New York State, who had long been a leader of the anti-British crusade in American politics.  More awkward still, President Wilson, in the course of his Presidential campaign, had himself spoken approvingly of free tolls for American ships.  The probability is that, when the President made this unfortunate reference to this clause in the Democratic programme, he had given the matter little personal investigation; it must be held to his credit that, when the facts were clearly presented to him, his mind quickly grasped the real point at issue—­that it was not a matter of commercial advantage or disadvantage, but one simply of national honour, of whether the United States proposed to keep its word or to break it.

Page’s contempt for the hair-drawn technicalities of lawyers was profound, and the tortuous effort to make the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty mean something quite different from what it said, inevitably moved him to righteous wrath.  Before sailing for England he spent several days in the State Department studying the several questions that were then at issue between his country and Great Britain.  A memorandum contains his impressions of the free tolls contention: 

“A little later I went to Washington again to acquaint myself with the business between the United States and Great Britain.  About that time the Senate confirmed my appointment, and I spent a number of days reading the recent correspondence between the two governments.  The two documents that stand out in my memory are the wretched lawyer’s note of Knox about the Panama tolls (I never read a less sincere, less convincing,