ship subsidy that this discrimination gives, couldn’t Congress be carried to repeal this discrimination?  For this economic objection also exists.

No Ambassador can do any very large constructive piece of work so long as this suspicion of the honour of our Government exists.  Sir Edward Grey will take it up in October or November.  If I could say then that the President will exert all his influence for this repeal—­that would go far.  If, when he takes it up, I can say nothing, it will be practically useless for me to take up any other large plan.  This is the most important thing for us on the diplomatic horizon.

     To the President

     Dornoch, Scotland,

     September 10, 1913.

     DEAR MR. PRESIDENT: 

I am spending ten or more of the dog days visiting the Englishman and the Scotchman in their proper setting—­their country homes—­where they show themselves the best of hosts and reveal their real opinions.  There are, for example, in the house where I happen to be to-day, the principals of three of the Scotch universities, and a Member of Parliament, and an influential editor.

They have, of course—­I mean all the educated folk I meet—­the most intelligent interest in American affairs, and they have an unbounded admiration for the American people—­their energy, their resourcefulness, their wealth, their economic power and social independence.  I think that no people ever really admired and, in a sense, envied another people more.  They know we hold the keys of the future.

But they make a sharp distinction between our people and our Government.  They are sincere, God-fearing people who speak their convictions.  They cite Tammany, the Thaw case, Sulzer, the Congressional lobby, and sincerely regret that a democracy does not seem to be able to justify itself.  I am constantly amazed and sometimes dumbfounded at the profound effect that the yellow press (including the American correspondents of the English papers) has had upon the British mind.  Here is a most serious journalistic problem, upon which I have already begun to work seriously with some of the editors of the better London papers.  But it is more than a journalistic problem.  It becomes political.  To eradicate this impression will take years of well-planned work.  I am going to make this the subject of one of the dozen addresses that I must deliver during the next six months—­“The United States as an Example of Honest and Honourable Government.”

And everywhere—­in circles the most friendly to us, and the best informed—­I receive commiseration because of the dishonourable attitude of our Government about the Panama Canal tolls.  This, I confess, is hard to meet.  We made a bargain—­a solemn compact—­and we have broken it.  Whether it were a good bargain or a bad one, a silly one or a wise one; that’s far from the point.  Isn’t it?