can Minister in England, had actually been signed by Lord Clarendon, Foreign Secretary, whose death in June, 1870, was followed by Lord Granville's removal from the Colonial to the Foreign Office. The Senate of the United States, however, rejected this convention by a majority of fifty-four to one, and Mr. Reverdy Johnson resigned his office. The doom of the convention was chiefly brought about by the efforts of Mr. Charles Sumner, a leading member of the Senate of the United States. Most readers are probably aware of the fact that treaties concluded on behalf of the American Government have to be referred for confirmation to the United States Senate, and that it is in the power of the Senate either to confirm or to reject them. In the foreign policy of the American Republic the Senate exercises a direct and most important influence. Mr. Sumner was at that time the most eloquent and the most influential mem ber of the Senate. He was a man of remarkable force of character, a somewhat "masterful" temperament, to use an expressive provincial word, a temperament corresponding with his great stature, his stately presence, and his singularly handsome and expressive face. He was one of the leaders of the anti-slavery movement, and the murderous assault made upon him some twelve years before in the old Senate Chamber at Washington by a Southern planter had filled the world then with horror and alarm. Sir George Cornewall Lewis happily described it as the first blow in a civil war. Mr Sumner had been for the greater part of his life an enthusiastic admirer of England and English institutions. He had made himself acquainted with England and Englishmen, and was a great favorite in English society. He was a warm friend of Mr. Cobden, Mr. Bright, the Duke of Argyll, and many other eminent English public men. He was particularly enthusiastic about England because of the manner in which she had emancipated her slaves and the emphatic terms in which English society always expressed

its horror of the system of slavery. In his own country Mr. Sumner passed for an Anglo-maniac. When the American Civil War broke out he expected, with full confidence, to find the sympathies of England freely given to the side of the North. He was struck with amazement when he found that they were to so great an extent given to the South. But when he saw that the Alabama and other Southern cruisers had been built in England, manned in England, and allowed to leave our ports with apparently the applause of three fourths of the representative men of England, his feelings toward this country underwent a sudden and a most complete change. He now persuaded himself that the sympathies of the English people were actually with slavery, and that England was resolved to lend her best help for the setting up of a slave-owning Republic to the destruction of the American Union.

In this Mr. Sumner was mistaken. Great wrong was thoughtlessly done to the American Union by the acts of statesmen and others in England, but it is not true that there was any general sympathy with slavery, or any national treachery to the American Union. The whole question has been already discussed in these pages, and the writer has not hesitated to condemn in the strongest terms much of the policy and many of the utterances of some of the leading statesmen of England. But Mr. Sumner was mistaken in his main conclusion-the conclusion that love of slavery and hatred of the Union dictated the foolish things that were often said, and the unrightful things that were sometimes done. His mind, however, became filled with a fervor of anger against England. The zeal of his course ate him up. All his love for England turned into hate. He was as little under the influence of sober reason, when he discussed the conduct of England, as Burke was when he declaimed against the French Revolution. During all his career Mr. Sumner had been a professed lover of peace, had made peace

his prevailing principle of action, and yet he now spoke and acted as if he were determined that there must be war between England and the United States. Mr. Sumner denounced the convention made by Mr. Reverdy Johnson with a force of argument and of passionate eloquence which would have borne down all opposition if the Senate had not already been almost unanimously of one mind with him. It is right to say that the particular convention agreed on between Lord Clarendon and Mr. Reverdy Johnson does not seem to have been one that the American Senate could reasonably be expected to accept, or that could possibly give satisfaction to the American people. Mr. Reverdy Johnson was a Marylander, and may possibly have had some tinge of Southern sympathies. With a kindly and goodnatured purpose to put an end to an international quarrel, he does not seem to have considered the difference between skinning over a wound and healing it. The defect of his convention was that it made the whole question a mere matter of individual claims. It professed to have to deal with a number of personal and private claims of various kinds, pending since a former settlement in 1853-claims made on the one side by British subjects against the American Government, and on the other by American citizens against the English Government; and it proposed to throw in the Alabama claims with all the others, and have a convention for the general clearance of the whole account. Now it must be evident to any one, English or American, who considers what the complaints made by the American Gov. ernment were that this way of dealing with the question could not possibly satisfy the American people. It is sur prising that a statesman like Lord Clarendon could for a moment have persuaded himself that there would be the slightest use in presenting such a convention to the American Senate. That he did so persuade himself and others is only one additional illustration of the curious ignorance of

the condition of American political and national feeling which misguided England's policy during the whole of the American war. The claim set up by the United States, on account of the cruise of the Alabama, was first of all a national claim. The American Government and people said. "The course you have taken has prolonged the war against us. You have given comfort and strength to our enemies. You have allowed them to use your ports as arsenals and points of departure for their attacks on us; your flag has protected their cruisers; your sailors have manned their vessels and shotted their guns. We claim of you as a nation injured by a nation." To this the convention signed by Lord Clarendon made answer, "We are willing that the two nations shall go into arbitration as to any individual claims for personal damages which a few Englishmen may have on the one side and a few Americans on the other. We are willing to look into the items of any little bill which Mr. Thompson, of New York, may present, for injuries done to his property, provided that you will do us the favor of perusing in the same spirit any bill which may be presented to you on behalf of Mr. Johnson, of Manchester." This is really a fair statement of the difference between the convention which the United States Senate rejected and that which the American Government afterward accepted.

The English Government wisely gave way. They consented to send out a commission to Washington to confer with an American commission, and to treat the whole question in dispute as national and not merely individual. The commission was to enter upon all the various subjects of dispute unsettled between England and the United States; the Alabama claims, the San Juan Boundary, and the Canadian Fishery Question. The Dominion of Canada was to be represented on the commission. The English commissioners were Earl de Grey and Ripon (afterward created Marquis of Ripon, in return for his services at Washington),

Sir Stafford Northcote, Mr. Mountague Bernard, Professor of International Law at the University of Oxford, and Sir Edward Thornton, English Minister at Washington. Sir John A. Macdonald represented Canada. The American commissioners were Mr. Hamilton Fish, Secretary of State, General Schenck, afterward American Minister in England, Mr. J. C. Bancroft Davis, Mr. Justice Nelson, Mr. Justice Williams, and Mr. E. R. Hoar.

The commissioners held a long series of meeting in Washington, and at length arrived at a basis of arbitration. This was set forth in a memorable document, the Treaty of Washington. The Treaty of Washington acknowledged the international character of the dispute, and it opened with a remarkable admission on the part of the English Government. It announced that "Her Britannic Majesty has authorized her high commissioners and plenipotentiaries to express, in a friendly spirit, the regret felt by her Majesty's Government for the escape, under whatever circumstances, of the Alabama and other vessels from British ports, and for the depredations committed by those vessels." This was a very unusual acknowledgment to make as the opening of a document intended to establish a tribunal of arbitration for the claims in dispute. It ought not in itself to be considered as anything of a humiliation. In public as in private life it ought to be honorable rather than otherwise to express regret that we should even unwittingly have done harm to our neighbor, or allowed harm to be done to him; that we have shot our arrow o'er the house and hurt our brother. But when compared with the stand which English ministers had taken not many years before, this was indeed a considerable change of attitude. It is not surprising that many Englishmen chafed at the appearance of submission which it presented. The treaty then proceeded to lay down three rules, which it was agreed should be accepted by the arbitrators as applicable