State of the Union AddressesTaft, William H. (William Howard)
History
State of the Union Addresses
Taft, William H. (William Howard)
Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
In China the policy of encouraging financial investment to enable that
country to help itself has had the result of giving new life and practical
application to the open-door policy. The consistent purpose of the present
administration has been to encourage the use of American capital in the
development of China by the promotion of those essential reforms to which
China is pledged by treaties with the United States and other powers. The
hypothecation to foreign bankers in connection with certain industrial
enterprises, such as the Hukuang railways, of the national revenues upon
which these reforms depended, led the Department of State early in the
administration to demand for American citizens participation in such
enterprises, in order that the United States might have equal rights and an
equal voice in all questions pertaining to the disposition of the public
revenues concerned. The same policy of promoting international accord among
the powers having similar treaty rights as ourselves in the matters of
reform, which could not be put into practical effect without the common
consent of all, was likewise adopted in the case of the loan desired by
China for the reform of its currency. The principle of international
cooperation in matters of common interest upon which our policy had already
been based in all of the above instances has admittedly been a great factor
in that concert of the powers which has been so happily conspicuous during
the perilous period of transition through which the great Chinese nation
has been passing.
CENTRAL AMERICA NEEDS OUR HELP IN DEBT ADJUSTMENT
In Central America the aim has been to help such countries as Nicaragua and
Honduras to help themselves. They are the immediate beneficiaries. The
national benefit to the United States is twofold. First, it is obvious
that the Monroe doctrine is more vital in the neighborhood of the Panama
Canal and the zone of the Caribbean than anywhere else. There, too, the
maintenance of that doctrine falls most heavily upon the United States. It
is therefore essential that the countries within that sphere shall be
removed from the jeopardy involved by heavy foreign debt and chaotic
national finances and from the ever-present danger of international
complications due to disorder at home. Hence the United States has been
glad to encourage and support American bankers who were willing to lend a
helping hand to the financial rehabilitation of such countries because this
financial rehabilitation and the protection of their customhouses from
being the prey of would be dictators would remove at one stroke the menace
of foreign creditors and the menace of revolutionary disorder.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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