West Across the Pacific: American Involvement in East Asia from 1 ...

A second example, said MacDonald, occurred at the time of negotiations regarding Canadian immigration (date unspecified), when the Americans “tried to acquire the benefits we might get as allies [of Japan].” Here, “they failed.” Another instance related to “trademarks in Corea [sic].” During the negotiations, the United States “suddenly gave up to Japanese jurisdiction…thereby letting go one of the sheet anchors of the trademark ship which, to continue the metaphor, has not yet, so far as we are concerned, been brought to port.” He noted many instances of “selfish policy on the part of the United States Government.”¹⁸

We need not concern ourselves with whether these British complaints against American policy were justified. Indeed, if we attempted such an evaluation, we would have to frame it against the very large background fact that Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey and his fellows were leading Britain straight into World War I—hardly an indication of the soundness of their diplomacy. Furthermore, these documents of 1910 include some small yet interesting sidelights, which illustrate the small-mindedness of British diplomacy; on the opium question, for example, where the British complain that the antiopium position taken by the United States was “particularly distasteful to the Government of India.”¹⁹

However, they do indicate clearly enough that the British took the Open Door policy quite seriously and, in fact, decided to keep their complaints to themselves. Thus, Grey instructed Bryce: “You should lose no opportunity of assuring the United States of our desire to work with them in all matters in the Far East so far as circumstances permit, and you should lay stress on our desire to maintain the status quo in Manchuria, where any change of the kind feared by the United States could not fail to affect our interests quite as much as theirs in a most detrimental manner. This is the sense in which I have always spoken to the American Ambassador here.”²⁰ The differences between British and American policy lay more in the realm of the possible than the desirable, with the British still feeling as Joseph Chamberlain had in 1900 that it might not be possible to maintain more than a token open door in Manchuria and north China.