idea of cession of territory in satisfaction of these claims crops out elsewhere in the course of this correspondence. Thus, Mr. Thornton, writing to Lord Clarendon, under date of April 19th (Ib., p. 53), says, [this] "mode of settlement [that is, by cession of territory] has frequently been hinted at to me.”

Whether such a form of indemnity is a desirable or expedient one for the United States, or whether indeed the cession of territory has any legitimate connection with the solution of the Alabama question at all, it is quite superfluous for the writer to undertake to settle. But, that the agitation of such a demand, and by Mr. Johnson himself, when freshly arrived in England, quite contradicts his assertions, that " we have obtained all that we ever asked," and that "the Government [of the United States] never exacted anything on its own account," seems to the writer too plain for further comment.

I hasten to the more substantial matter of the total abandonment by Mr. Johnson, and (I must add) by Mr. Seward, of the national ground of complaint against Great Britain, connected with the matter of the Belligerent Recognition of the Rebel Confederacy, and of which all tangible notice is omitted in both of the Conventions of November 10th and January 14th. Here I think every American who has gone to the bottom of the Alabama controversy will agree with me, that the United States Senate were fully justified in repudiating Messrs. Seward's and Johnson's diplomatic doings in toto.

How stands this point of Belligerent Recognition as left in the latest convention, and as dwelt upon in preceding negotiations which led to it? I fear that I shall have to tax the reader's patience with some explanatory details on this head; yet I believe it unavoidable to a just understanding of the merits of the discussion.

Doubtless he will have observed no allusion to Belligerent Recognition in Mr. Seward's original instructions to Mr. Johnson of July 20th, which I have already quoted: nor, I may add, am I aware that Mr. Seward ever afterward so much as alludes to the subject throughout the whole correspondence, as published in the blue books of either country. This is significant, at the outset. Yet it is the same Mr. Seward who during the course of the civil war had made no less than six formal demands as American Secretary of State upon the Governments of England and France for the recall of that obnoxious measure; and the same Mr. Seward who had a hundred times at least denounced to those Governments their hasty and unfriendly recognition of the rebels as a belligerent power, as the fountain and source of all our foreign woes. Was it intentionally kept out of

sight, or virtually ignored, in these Johnson-Stanley and JohnsonClarendon conventions, in order to effect some arrangement, which should have the éclat of disposing of a great international controversy?

In reply to this question, and at the same time to meet Mr. Johnson's thrust that we should have got by his convention all that we ever asked for, I beg the reader to go no further back with me into the record of Mr. Seward's complaints about the national reparation expected from England for her hasty recognition of the rebels as belligerents, than six months prior to Mr. Reverdy Johnson's confirmation as Minister. Here is what the American Secretary of State authorized Mr. Johnson's predecessor, Mr. Adams, to say to the British Government in January, 1868. I only quote an extract:

SIR: Your dispatch of the 24th of December, No. 1,503, has been received. You were quite right in saying to Lord Stanley that the negotiation in regard to the so-called Alabama claims is now considered by this Government to have been closed without a prospect of its being reopened. With reference to the conversation which occurred between yourself and his lordship on the subject of a recent dispatch of Mr. Ford [British Secretary of Legation at Washington], in which Mr. Ford gave an account of a conversation which he had with me, it would perhaps be sufficient to say that Mr. Ford submitted no report of that conversation, nor did he inform me what he proposed to write to Lord Stanley. I may add that either Mr. Ford or Lord Stanley, or both, have misapprehended the full scope of what is reported by Mr. Ford as a suggestion on my part.

Both of these gentlemen seem to have understood me as referring only to mu tual pecuniary war claims of citizens and subjects of the two countries which have lately been extensively discussed. Lord Stanley seems to have resolved that the so-called Alabama claims shall be treated so exclusively as a pecuniary commercial claim, as to insist on altogether excluding the proceedings of Her Majesty's Government in regard to the war from consideration in the arbitration which he proposed.

On the other hand, I have been singularly unfortunate in my correspondence, if I have not given it to be clearly understood, that a violation of neutrality by the Queen's proclamation, and kindred proceedings of the British Government, is regarded as a national wrong and injury to the United States; and that the lowest form of satisfaction for that national injury that the United States could accept, would be found in an indemnity, without reservation or compromise, by the British Government to those citizens of the United States who had suffered individual injury and damages by the vessels of war unlawfully built, equipped, manned, fitted out, or entertained and protected in the British ports and harbors, in consequence of a failure of the British Government to preserve its neutrality.

C. F. ADAMS, Esq., &c., &c.

WM. H. SEWARD.

This, I venture to think, is a very moderate and just statement of the American claim, and one which will never be substantially departed from by the country in any settlement of the question hereafter to be arranged. Had Mr. Reverdy Johnson never heard of it? Does either of his conventions recognize “a national wrong and injury,” or provide for its "indemnity without reservation or compromise” “to

those who have suffered individual injury"? Let us look a little more closely at Mr. Johnson's dealings with Belligerent Recognition, since, as we have seen, Mr. Seward keeps an ominous silence in regard to it.

So far as I can find, the only mention at any time of the subject just named, on Mr. Johnson's part, occurred in one of his early interviews with Lord Stanley, prior to the signing of the convention of November 10th, and is thus reported by Lord Stanley in a dispatch to Mr. Thornton, under date of October 21st. The negotiation of the first convention, it would seem from one of Mr. Johnson's own letters, was about this time just being entered upon:

In this conversation little was said as to the point on which the former negotiations broke off, viz.: the claim made by the United States Government to raise before the arbiter the question of the alleged premature recognition by Her Majesty's Government of the Confederates as belligerents. I stated to Mr. Reverdy Johnson that we could not, on this point, depart from the position which we had taken up; but I saw no impossibility in so framing the reference, and that by mutual consent, either tacit or express, the difficulty might be avoided.-Blue Book, ut sup, p. 10.

As the subject is dropped from this time forth by the American envoy, so far as can be learned from the published correspondence of either Government, are we to conclude that the British proposition was at once submitted to, and that that Government, being no longer importuned to depart from its position, it was henceforth mutually agreed between the two negotiators to concert "how not to do it"? Whether such an agreement was avowedly ever entered into by them or not, it is plain that it was most effectively carried out, so far as the American Minister was concerned, by the convention of November 10th, the terms of which, so far as this point is concerned, I am about to cite. Meanwhile, I must not deprive the reader of Mr. Johnson's report of his own doings on that head to the Department of State, showing that Lord Stanley's ingenious device was, at least, not unfavorably entertained by him. Says Mr. Johnson, writing home to Mr. Seward, under date of the very day of signing the first convention (November 10th), and expressing his own gratification at what he had achieved:

It is proper that I should give, as briefly as may be necessary, my reasons for assenting to the convention, or rather to some of its provisions: 1. You have heretofore refused to enter into an agreement to arbitrate the Alabama claims unless this Government would agree that the question of its right to acknowledge as belligerents the late so-called Southern Confederacy be also included within the arbitration. You will see by the terms of the first and the fourth articles, that that question, as well as every other which the United States may think is involved in such claims, is to be before the commissioners or the arbitrator. This is done by the use of general terms, and the omission of any specification of the questions to be decided. And my authority for agreeing to this is found in your original instructions of the 20th of July last, and is indeed to be found in the correspondence between yourself and my predecessor regarding these claims,—N. Y, Times, ut sup.

I have already quoted the last paragraph, as above, in another connection. It deserves a repetition, however, as showing that while Mr. Johnson professed to have read and to be familiar with the instructions given to his predecessor, Mr. Adams (among which was this recent letter of January 13, 1868, instructing Mr. A. that the United States claimed a national as well as a pecuniary indemnity), Mr. Johnson believes that he can find in those instructions an authority (!) for dexterously declining to insist upon the very same demand. I pray the reader's special attention to Mr. Johnson's devise for giving the go-by to the very point which he reminds Mr. Seward that he (Mr. Seward) had always made a sine quâ non in arbitration.

"You will see by the terms of the first and fourth articles, that that question [Belligerent Recognition] **** is to be before the commissioners or the arbitrator. This is done by the use of general terms and the omission of any specification of the questions to be decided." Rather a novel mode of getting a point before an arbitrator is it not?" to omit all specification of the question to be decided!” Could a better exemplification be found of the maxim, that "language is not intended to express men's ideas, but to conceal them?"

And yet, will it be believed of this brave exponent of American rights-this successful delineator of Hamlet with the part of Hamlet left out-that, writing home to the Secretary of State, in that same obnoxious letter of February 17th, from which I have so often quoted, Mr. Reverdy Johnson-after his work is all done-after he "has met the enemy and is theirs," and is giving his version of how it happened -could have expressed himself about the importance of Belligerent Recognition to the American case, as follows?

Supposing, then, that the [Blockade] proclamation of the President was known to this Government [the British] when they declared the insurgents to be belligerents a question of fact which I do not propose to examine-it furnished no justification for the action of this Government; and if it was not justified, as I confidently believe was the case, the act is one which bears materially upon the question whether the Government is not bound to indemnify for the losses occasioned by the Alabama and other vessels, for then that vessel and the others could not have been constructed or received in British ports, as they would have been in the estimation of English law, as well as the law of nations, piratical vessels. They never, therefore, would have been on the ocean, and the vessels and the cargoes belonging to American citizens destroyed by them would have been in safety. Upon this ground, then, independent of the question of proper diligence, the obligation of Great Britain to meet the losses seems to me to be most apparent.

Weighty and just words those! and which it is to be hoped will be remembered by our English friends when they are quoting the rest of Mr. Reverdy Johnson's record against us! But what a pity that they had not been uttered to the British Foreign Office before the two

conventions of November 10th and January 14th were signed! And still more, what a pity that they had not found a formal expression in those national compacts, instead of the ingenious device of "omitting any specification of the question to be decided"!

But I am detaining the reader too long from the text of the Convention of November 10th. Here are its three important articles, so far as they touch the "Alabama" controversy-the only reference to the claims throughout the document. Indeed, but for these it would not appear that the existence of an Alabama," or an "Alabama grievance, had even so much as been heard of before by the parties signitary.

ARTICLE IV.

The commissioners shall have power to adjudicate upon the class of claims referred to in the official correspondence between the two Governments as the " Alabama" claims; but before any of such claims is taken into consideration by them, the two high contracting parties shall fix upon some sovereign or head of a friendly State as an arbitrator in respect of such claims, to whom such class of claims shall be referred in case the commissioners shall be unable to come to an unanimous decision upon the same.

ARTICLE V

In the event of a decision on any of the claims mentioned in the next preceding article being arrived at by the arbitrator, involving a question of compensation to be paid, the amount of such compensation shall be referred back to the commissioners for adjudication; or, in the event of their not being able to come to a decision, it shall then be decided by the arbitrator appointed by them, or who shall have been determined by lot according to the provisions of Article I.

ARTICLE VI.

With regard to the before-mentioned "Alabama" class of claims, neither Government shall make out a case in support of its position, nor shall any person be heard for or against any such claim. The official correspondence which has already taken place between the two Governments, respecting the questions at issue, shall alone be laid before the commissioners; and (in the event of their not coming to an unanimous decision, as provided in Article IV.), then before the arbitrator, without argument, written or verbal, and without the production of any further evidence.

The commissioners unanimously, or the arbitrator, shall, however, be at liberty to call for argument or further evidence, if they or he shall deem it necessary.

The reader will have taken notice of the phrase used in the first line of Article IV., "the commissioners shall have power to adjudicate," which I have taken the liberty to italicise. While in the previous articles it is stipulated that all other claims embraced in the arbitration are to be laid unreservedly before the commissioners or arbitrator, and it is made their business to hear them, the so-called "Alabama" claims are only to be permitted an auditing, as it were, by special grace. While blockade-breakers and Confederate bondholders may