thing else. Until the coastwise-shipping monopoly saw a chance to grab a million dollars or so a year at the expense of the National Treasury and of the national honor, nobody ever pretended that it meant anything else.

Mr. Hay is dead and Lord Pauncefote is dead; but Joseph H. Choate, who as American Ambassador to Great Britain helped regotiate the treaty, is still alive. No other living man is so well qualified to give testimony as to the meaning of this provision, and this is what Mr. Choate says:

As the lips of both these diplomatists and great patriots, who were true to their own countries and each regardful of the rights of the other, are sealed in death, I think that it is proper that I should say what I think both of them, if they were here to-day, would say that the clause in the Panama Toll act exempting coastwise American shipping from the payment of tolls is in direct violation of the treaty.

I venture to say that in the whole course of the negotiations of this particular treaty, no claim, no suggestion, was made that there should be any exemption of anybody.

The whole civilized world is against the United States on this issue. As Senator Lodge says, we are threatened with the stigma of an "outlaw Nation" which has no respect for its solemn word or its solemn pledges. The President of the United States, in urging Congress to repeal the special canal privileges granted to the coastwise monopoly, has said :

I ask this of you in support of the foreign policy of the Administration. I shall not know how to deal with matters of even greater delicacy and nearer consequence if you do not grant it to me in ungrudging measure.

In the face of the record and of such a solemn appeal, Lewis Nixon writes to The World to say that he has never seen a sincere or logical argument to uphold the Hay-Pauncefote provisions against remission of tolls." Senator O'Gorman, who is helping the coastwise monopoly keep its hands in the National Treasury, has even forgotten that he was once eminent as a Judge, and falls back upon the pettifogging argument that

The word "vessels" as used in the treaty applies solely to ships in the overseas trade. It does not apply and was never intended to apply to the coastwise trade.

In other words, a vessel is a vessel if it does not get a subsidy, but it is a raft or a derrick or a pike-pole if it does get a subsidy.

The Constitution provides that all treaties made under the authority of the United States shall be part of "the supreme law of the land." But Congress has recognized a higher law than this supreme law. That higher law is in the pockets of the coastwise-shipping monopoly. In order to give a million dollars a year to men who are already protected against every form of foreign competition, Congress undertakes to violate a treaty and break the pledge of the Nation. The Democratic part of Congress which upholds this tolls exemption is also turning its back upon the fundamental principle of its party and voting special privileges to a special interest at the expense both of the public Treasury and the public faith. And to what purpose? Not to build up an American merchant marine, for not a cent's worth of privilege is given to any American ship in the foreign trade. Every ship flying the American flag which goes through the Panama Canal bound to any foreign port must pay the same tolls as a British ship or a German ship or a French ship.

The subsidy is all for the shipping that has no foreign competition. The treaty-breaking is all for a monopoly that has no foreign competition. The honor of the Nation and the historic principles of the Democratic party are alike flouted for the profit of a few coastwise carriers, while 95,000,000 American people are made to pay the bill in money and to pay the bill in international enmity.

The United States built the canal subject to the provisions of the Hay-Pauncefote treaty and it is bound by those provisions. There is no external power or tribunal which can compel this country to respect its pledges, but the pledges are as valid as if we were the weakest instead of the strongest of nations.

This country began its national existence by proclaiming in the Declaration of Independence its "decent respect for the opinions of mankind." It must still maintain that decent respect for the opinions of mankind. Whatever Congress may think or whatever Congress may do at the behest of a monopoly 's lobby, the American people are a people who want to keep the faith.

Π. ARGUMENT

A. ELEMENTS

1. Introduction, Including Special Issues

THE THREE HYPOTHESES RESPECTING THE HISTORY OF NATURE 1

T. H. Huxley

We live in and form part of a system of things of immense diversity and perplexity, which we call Nature; and it is a matter of the deepest interest to all of us that we should form just conceptions of the constitution of that system and of its past history. With relation to this universe, man is, in extent, little more than a mathematical point; in duration but a fleeting shadow; he is a mere reed shaken in the winds of force. But as Pascal long ago remarked, although a mere reed, he is a thinking reed; and in virtue of that wonderful capacity of thought, he has the power of framing for himself a symbolic conception of the universe, which, although doubtless highly imperfect and inadequate as a picture of the great whole, is yet sufficient to serve him as a chart for the guidance of his practical affairs. It has taken long ages of toilsome and often fruitless labor to enable men to look steadily at the shifting scenes of the phantasmagoria of Nature, to notice what is fixed among her fluctuations, and what is regular among her apparent irregularities; and it is only comparatively lately, within the last few centuries, that the conception of a universal order and of a definite course of things, which we term the course of Nature, has emerged.

From Collected Essays. (Vol. IV; Science and Hebrew Tradition; Lectures on Evolution.) D. Appleton and Company.

But, once originated, the conception of the constancy of the order of Nature has become the dominant idea of modern thought. To any person who is familiar with the facts upon which that conception is based, and is competent to estimate their significance, it has ceased to be conceivable that chance should have any place in the universe, or that events should depend upon any but the natural sequence of cause and effect. We have come to look upon the present as the child of the past and as the parent of the future; and, as we have excluded chance from a place in the universe, so we ignore, even as a possibility, the notion of any interference with the order of Nature. Whatever may be men's speculative doctrines, it is quite certain that every intelligent person guides his life and risks his fortune upon the belief that the order of Nature is constant, and that the chain of natural causation is never broken.

In fact, no belief which we entertain has so complete a logical basis as that to which I have just referred. It tacitly underlies every process of reasoning; it is the foundation of every act of the will. It is based upon the broadest induction, and it is verified by the most constant, regular, and universal of deductive processes. But we must recollect that any human belief, however broad its basis, however defensible it may seem, is, after all, only a probable belief, and that our widest and safest generalizations are simply statements of the highest degree of probability. Though we are quite clear about the constancy of the order of Nature, at the present time, and in the present state of things, it by no means necessarily follows that we are justified in expanding this generalization into the infinite past, and in denying, absolutely, that there may have been a time when Nature did not follow a fixed order, when the relations of cause and effect were not definite, and when extra-natural agencies interfered with the general course of Nature. Cautious men will allow that a universe so different from that which we know may have existed; just as a very candid thinker may admit that a world in which two and two do not make four, and in which two straight lines do not enclose a space, may exist. But the same caution which forces the admission of such possibilities