favours done us, not a hint of sympathy in the difficulties of the time.  There is nothing in its tone to show that it came from an American to an Englishman:  it might have been from a Hottentot to a Fiji-Islander.

I am almost sure—­I’ll say quite sure—­that this uncourteous manner is far more important than its endless matter.  It has greatly hurt our friends, the real men of the Kingdom.  It has made the masses angry—­which is of far less importance than the severe sorrow that our discourtesy of manner has brought to our friends—­I fear to all considerate and thoughtful Englishmen.

Let me illustrate:  When the Panama tolls controversy arose, Taft ceased to speak the language of the natural man and lapsed into lawyer’s courthouse zigzagging mutterings.  Knox wrote a letter to the British Government that would have made an enemy of the most affectionate twin brother—­all mere legal twists and turns, as agreeable as a pocketful of screws.  Then various bovine “international lawyers” wrote books about it.  I read them and became more and more confused the further I went:  you always do.  It took me some time to recover from this word-drunk debauch and to find my own natural intelligence again, the common sense that I was born with.  Then I saw that the whole thing went wrong from the place where that Knox legal note came in.  Congressmen in the backwoods quoted cryptic passages from it, thought they were saying something, and proceeded to make their audiences believe that somehow England had hit us with a club—­or would have hit us but for Knox.  That pure discourtesy kept us apart from English sympathy for something like two years.

Then the President took it up.  He threw the legal twaddle into the gutter.  He put the whole question in a ten-minutes’ speech to Congress, full of clearness and fairness and high courtesy.  It won even the rural Congressmen.  It was read in every capital and the men who conduct every government looked up and said, “This is a real man, a brave man, a just man.”  You will recall what Sir Edward Grey said to me:  “The President has taught us all a lesson and set us all a high example in the noblest courtesy.”

     This one act brought these two nations closer together than they
     had ever been since we became an independent nation.  It was an act
     of courtesy....

My dear House, suppose the postman some morning were to leave at your door a thing of thirty-five heads and three appendices, and you discovered that it came from an old friend whom you had long known and greatly valued—­this vast mass of legal stuff, without a word or a turn of courtesy in it—­what would you do?  He had a grievance, your old friend had.  Friends often have.  But instead of explaining it to you, he had gone and had his lawyers send this many-headed, much-appendiced ton of stuff.  It wasn’t by that method that you found