Mr. Choate to Mr. Hay.
London, February 12, 1902.
Sir: I have the honor to report that in a conversation which I had yesterday with His Majesty’s secretary of state for foreign affairs, I found that he already knew substantially the position which you had taken with Russia and China in respect to the proposed Manchurian convention and the separate convention with the Russian-Chinese [Page 512] Bank, and that it exactly tallied with the position of his Government in the same matter. It had been freely stated for some days in the London papers that the United States, Great Britain, and Japan were presenting the same views at St. Petersburg. He thought the convention with the Russian-Chinese Bank, though it expressed the privileges granted or conceded by the terms as “preferential,” would practically be exclusive, and that it would create a monopoly which would not only conflict with treaty rights and lawful and equal commerce, and impair Chinese sovereign rights and its discharge of its international obligations, but would probably be followed by similar “preferential” concessions to other powers, and so the whole policy of equal rights of all nations in commerce and navigation and of the “open door” might be seriously invaded. I could not discover any difference in the positions of the two Governments on this important subject.
I have, etc.,