The minds of the two governments had now met. The amendments proposed on each site, with the modifications noted, were agreed upon. The treaty was reduced to final form, engrossed for signature, and on November 19, 1901, Lord Pauncefote had the honor to inform the Marquis of Lansdowne that on the preceding day he had visited the State Department and had “signed the new treaty for the construction of an interoceanic canal.” The Senate ratified the treaty on December 16 following. Venezuela had opened the way for Panama. The hand withdrawn from broad areas east of the Orinoco had relinquished its lawful rights under the canal partnership, and in both cases at our instance. In the one, Lord Salisbury’s noble British contempt of our demands and our doctrine forced us into an unaccustomed attitude of firmness. In the other, the Marquis of Lansdowne’s open-minded, amicable, and statesmanlike disposition favored our interest, and left us free to give to the commerce of the world a channel of communication that had been the dream of centuries. We had expressly set up the principle of the Monroe Doctrine as the warrant of our interference for the protection of Venezuela, and Great Britain gave heed by submitting to impartial examination titles she had insisted upon enforcing as though they were beyond dispute. Ill-judged concessions contrary to the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine, made in the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, we recalled by a substitute agreement with Great Britain which left us with a free hand for the construction and control of the canal as an exclusively American work. The vitality, the continuing and constant applicability, of the Monroe Doctrine at every stage of our National existence, as Mr. Cleveland put it, could hardly be more conclusively demonstrated than by the record of the American Government’s part in bringing about the agreement to arbitrate the Venezuela boundary dispute, and in replacing the outworn Clayton-Bulwer convention by the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty. [7] ~The Century Magazine~, July, 1901. “THE OREGON MUDDLE” A CURIOUS PHASE OF THE HAYES-TILDEN CONTROVERSY BY VICTOR ROSEWATER Editor of “The Omaha Daily Bee” I have been intensely interested in the articles appearing in ~The Century~ for May and June upon the Presidential election of 1876. While I could have no part in, nor recollection of, that controversy, acquaintance with two of the prominent figures in it some time ago led me to look into one phase of the question, and the facts concerning it brought out by the congressional investigation, which seem to me to bear vitally upon this discussion, though they have been entirely ignored. I refer to what was known as “the Oregon muddle,” being the attempt of the Democrats to secure one of the electoral votes of Oregon for Tilden, who had plainly no moral right to it.