Under this treaty the Government of Great Britain made a protest against the decision of the United States to exempt its coastwise traffic from the payment of tolls, claiming such exemption to be a violation of the neutrality agreement. This protest came in the form of two notes to the American Government. The first was written as a warning to Congress that the British Government would regard the exemption of American coastwise traffic from the payment of tolls as a discrimination against British shipping, and a violation of the neutrality agreement between the two countries. It admitted that if the United States were to refund or to remit the tolls charged, it would not be a violation of the letter of the treaty, and acknowledged that if the exemption of coastwise American shipping from toll charges were so regulated as to make it certain that only bona fide coastwise traffic, which is reserved for American vessels, would be benefited by this agreement, then Great Britain could have no objection. But it declared that England did not believe that such regulation was possible. After Congress, with this note in mind, had passed the canal toll law with an exemption to ships carrying goods between the two coasts of the United States, President Taft, in approving the measure, declared that the canal was built wholly at the cost of the United States on territory ceded to it by a nation that had the indisputable right to make the cession, and that, therefore, it was nobody else's business how we managed it. He contended that for many years American law had given to American ships the exclusive right to handle cargo between American ports, and that, therefore, England was not hurt at all when that shipping was exempted from toll charges. England responded, in a second note, that the clear obligation of the United States under the treaty was to keep the canal open to the citizens and subjects of the United States and Great Britain on equal terms, and to allow the ships of all nations to use it on terms of entire equality. It also contended that the United States is embraced in this term of "all nations"; that the British Government would scarcely have entered into the Hay-Pauncefote treaty if it had understood that England was to be denied the equal use of the Panama Canal with America. The three direct objections urged by the British against the American canal law were: That it gives the President the right to discriminate against foreign shipping; that it exempts coastwise traffic from paying tolls; and that it gives the Government-owned vessels of the Republic of Panama the right to use the canal free. The answer of the United States to the first of these objections was that the right of the President to fix tolls in a way that would be discriminatory against British shipping was a question that could be considered only when the President should exercise such action.