We will not willingly give up our right to elect a President; we may allow the President to appoint an American member to an international commission to allocate East Indies rubber; in return for which we will allocate our wheat or cotton or motors--on the advice of other nations, but without bowing our neck to their rule. We have always accepted specific international interference in our affairs--the Alabama claims and the Oregon boundary and the successive troubles in Venezuela prove that our "sovereign right" to do what we please was never exercised without some respect for the opinion of mankind--and the strength of the British navy. Indeed recent events indicate that for generations our independence of action, the reality of independence, rested on our faith in the British fleet. The moment we become realistic about our independence we will be able to collaborate effectively with other nations. We got a few lessons in realistic dealings in 1941--lend-lease and the trade for the naval bases were blunt, statesmanlike but most undiplomatic--moves to strengthen the British fleet, to extend our own area of safety, and to give us time against the threat of Japan. They protected our independence, but they also compromised it; the British by any concession to Japan might have weakened us; we took the risk, and our action was in effect an act of defensive war against Germany. Like Jefferson, buying Louisiana to protect us against any foreign power across the Mississippi, President Roosevelt acted under dire necessity and as Jefferson (not Roosevelt) put it, was not too deeply concerned with Constitutionality. The situation in 1941 required not only the bases but the continued functioning of the British fleet in the Atlantic; and we got what we needed. The economic agreement of 1942 is probably a greater invasion of our simon-pure independence of action; although it empowers a post-war President to decide how much of lend-lease was returned by valor in the field, it specifically binds us to alter our tariff if Britain can induce its Commonwealth of Nations to give up the system of "imperial preference". All our tariffs are horsetrades and the most-favored nation is a sweet device; but heretofore we have not bartered our tariffs in advance. Certainly a post-war economic union is in the wind; certainly we will accept it if it comes to us piecemeal, by agreements and joint-commissions and international resolutions which are not binding, but are accepted and become as routine as the law of copyright which once invaded our sacred national right to steal or the international postal union which gave us the right to send a letter to any country for five cents.