After the Alaskan boundary had been settled, no critical issue arose between the two North American democracies for several years. There were still questions outstanding which in earlier days would have given opportunity for tail-twisting or eagle-plucking politicians to make trouble, but in the new era of neighbourliness which now dawned they were settled amicably or allowed to fall into blessed oblivion. A remarkable change in the spirit in which the two peoples regarded each other came about in this period. The abandonment by the United States of its traditional policy of isolation, its occupation of the Philippines, its policy of the open door for China, its participation in the Morocco dispute, effected a wonderful transformation in the American attitude towards questions of foreign policy and compelled a diplomacy more responsible and with more of give and take. This led to incidents--such as that in Manila Bay, when a British admiral lined up alongside the American fleet against a threatening German squadron--which made it clear that Great Britain was the one trustworthy friend the United States possessed. The steady growth of democratic feeling in Britain, her daring {257} experiments in social betterment, her sympathetic treatment of the Irish and South African questions, increased the friendliness and the interest which the majority of Americans felt at bottom for what was their motherland. Canada's prosperity awakened respectful interest. A country which fifty or a hundred thousand good Americans every year preferred to their own must be more than the negligible northern fringe it once was thought to be. Canada reciprocated this more friendly feeling. Prosperity mended her querulous mood and made her too busy to remember the grievances of earlier days. Her international horizon, too, had widened; the United States was no longer the sole foreign power with which she had to deal, though still the most important. Yet this friendlier feeling did not lead to a general desire for freer trade relations. Quite the contrary; confident in her own newly realized resources and in the possibility of finding markets elsewhere, dominated by protectionist sentiment and by the growing cities, Canada became on the whole indifferent to what had once appeared an essential goal. In Sir Wilfrid Laurier's phrase, the pilgrimages from Ottawa to Washington had ceased: {258} the pilgrimages must come, if at all, from Washington to Ottawa.