This assertion made by Great Britain is met by the Memorandum which, when signing the Panama Canal Act, President Taft left to accompany the Act. The President contends that, in view of the fact that the Panama Canal has been constructed by the United States wholly at her own cost, upon territory ceded to her by the Republic of Panama, the United States possesses the power to allow her own vessels to use the Canal upon _such terms as she sees fit_, and that she may, therefore, permit her vessels to pass through the Canal either without the payment of any tolls, or on payment of lower tolls than those levied upon foreign vessels, and that she may remit to her own vessels any tolls which may have been levied upon them for the use of the Canal. The President denies that Article III, No. 1, of the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty can be invoked against such power of the United States, and he contends that this Article III was adopted by the United States for a specific purpose, namely, as a basis of the neutralisation of the Canal, and for no other purpose. This article, the President says, is a declaration of policy by the United States that the Canal shall be neutral; that the attitude of the Government of the United States is that all nations will be treated alike and no discrimination is to be made against any one of them observing the five conditions enumerated in Article III, Nos. 2-6. The right to the use of the Canal and to equality of treatment in the use depends upon the observance of the conditions by the nations to whom the United States has extended that privilege. The privileges of all nations to which the use of the Canal has been granted subject to the observance of the conditions for its use, are to be equal to the privileges granted to any one of them which observes those conditions. In other words--so the President continues--the privilege to use the Canal is a conditional most-favoured-nation treatment, the measure of which, in the absence of an express stipulation to that effect, is not what the United States gives to her own subjects, but the treatment to which she submits other nations.