62d Congress, 1st Session.
Senate Doc. (Executive Series C.)
Special Message from the President of the United States in relation to the Honduran and Nicaraguan Loan Conventions.
[Read June 29, 1911; referred to the Committee on Foreign Relations, and ordered to be printed in confidence for the use of the Senate.]
To the Senate:
The loan convention between the United States and Nicaragua, signed at Washington on June 6, 1911, and which I transmitted, to the Senate on the following day with a view to obtaining that body’s advice and consent to its ratification, was approved by the Nicaraguan Congress on June 14 with certain slight verbal changes so entirely consistent with the meaning of the convention as to make the acquiescence of this Government in such textual changes quite unobjectionable.
Upon the receipt very shortly of an authenticated copy of the amended text I shall ask the Senate to take favorable action upon this final form of the convention. Meanwhile, however, inasmuch as the substance and the principle of the convention are unchanged, and are indeed the same as in the convention between the United States and Honduras, submitted to the Senate January 26, 1911,1 I take this opportunity again very earnestly to recommend that the Senate give to these two conventions its thorough deliberation in order that when I shall have laid before you the amended text of that with Nicaragua your final action may be taken at an early date.
It is doubtless unnecessary for me to reiterate my well-considered conviction that it is the duty of the United States to ratify these conventions. Among the reasons for this belief I may mention that these conventions are a practical measure of peace; that they are of vast commercial advantage, especially to the Southern States; that so far from involving entanglements, they will greatly reduce actual interference in Central American affairs; that they make American diplomacy and American capital helpful to neighboring republics to which our friendliness is peculiarly clue; and that they lay the foundations for peace in the neighborhood of the Panama Canal, where constant turbulence is especially intolerable.
The ratification is urgent at the present session, because in the case of Nicaragua a loan can not be made; the Groce and Cannon indemnities can not be paid; the Emery claim can not be met; other claims and questions of monopolistic concessions can not be adjusted; railway improvements can not be undertaken; and, in short, Nicaraguan finances can not be removed from chaos to a condition where trade will prosper and where the Government revenues will not be the prey of revolution.
In the case of the Honduras convention, there are still other reasons for urgency. The Government of the United States can not expect the British Government indefinitely to delay proceeding to take its own measures for the settlement of the bonded debt due British subjects, and American bankers can not be expected indefinitely to hold options upon the foreign bonds.
[Page 1077]I deem it my duty again to emphasize my conviction that these conventions if examined in the broad aspects of the true policies involved will be found so responsive to the duty and to the interests of the United States as a whole that they will receive at the present session the approval of the Senate and the consequent ratification deemed by the Executive of really vital importance.
Washington , June 28, 1911 .