Thus, in the slow process of time public opinion was prepared and the way cleared for the ending of a joint protectorate agreement with Great Britain by the substitution of the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty for the convention negotiated fifty years before between Mr. Clayton and Sir Henry Bulwer. The time for action had now come. The French company was bankrupt, the commercial demand for a canal had become more pressing, and the voyage of the _Oregon_ from the Pacific coast around Cape Horn to take her place with the blockading squadron that encircled the harbor entrance at Santiago de Cuba brought vividly to the minds of the American people the vital need of a canal as a measure of national defense. Commissions were studying routes and making estimates of cost. There could no longer be any doubt that the two oceans were to be connected, and with all possible speed, by a navigable way. There was an obstacle--the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty. If we built a Nicaragua canal, we must forego “any exclusive control,” and we must submit to the engagements of article V, that the United States and Great Britain jointly will “protect it from interruption, seizure, or unjust confiscation, and that they will guarantee the neutrality thereof.” We must observe the further stipulation of article VI, requiring us to join Great Britain in inviting other nations to enter into the arrangement for the construction, control, and guaranty of this American canal. If we chose to build at Panama, we were bound by article VIII to make a new treaty with Great Britain for a joint protectorate over that route.
Never for a day after President Cleveland’s Venezuela message would the American people have been in a mood to sanction any canal undertaking under these vexatious and impossible conditions. We were quite done with the idea of a joint protectorate over an isthmian canal. The resolve had been taken to build a canal, and the conclusion reached that it must be a canal of our own construction and under our exclusive control.
Most fortunately, we found the Government of Great Britain in an assenting mood. Indeed, the contrast between the rasping quality of Lord Salisbury’s notes declining arbitration of the Venezuela boundary dispute and the candid, placable tone of Lord Lansdowne’s correspondence in the negotiations that led to the superseding of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty by the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty silenced, if it did not shame, those half-hearted Americans who had denounced Mr. Cleveland’s memorable message of December 17 as “the crime of the century” and a menace to the friendly relations between ourselves and our kinsmen of England. Following President McKinley’s message of December, 1898, in which he pointed out that the prospective expansion of American commerce and influence in the Pacific called more imperatively than ever for the control of the projected canal by the United States, Lord Pauncefote was instructed to acquaint himself with our attitude. He was informed that we desired at once to enter upon the necessary pourparlers, with a view to such modifications of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty as would remove all obstacles to our construction of the canal, which it was evident would not be undertaken by private capital. To this her Majesty’s Government assented, and a draft of the proposed convention was handed to Lord Pauncefote by Secretary Hay on January 11, 1899. This convention her Majesty’s Government, after due consideration, “accepted unconditionally as a signal proof,” said Lord Lansdowne, “of their friendly disposition and of their desire not to impede the execution of a project declared to be of National importance to the people of the United States.”