by his final sanction. In certain limited or constitutional monarchies, the consent of the legislative power of the nation is in some cases required for that purpose. In some republics, as in that of the United States of America, the advice and consent of the Senate are essential, to enable the Chief Executive Magistrate to pledge the national faith in this form. In all these cases, it is, consequently, an implied condi tion in negotiating with foreign powers, that the treaties concluded by the executive gov ernment shall be subject to ratification in the manner prescribed by the fundamental laws of the State.

Did not the two respective British Foreign Secretaries, who successively negotiated with Mr. Reverdy Johnson, know of this "implied condition" in the due ratification of any American treaty, of which Mr. Wheaton speaks? Not only were they apprised of it in due season, but, as we have seen in the limited abstract of the official correspondence which we have had occasion to make, both Messrs. Seward and Johnson were constantly calling it to the notice of the two Foreign Secretaries, by suggesting that this or that provision must be adopted in order to secure the Senatorial sauction. It has even appeared that the American Secretary of State notified the British Minister at Washington, as one of the reasons for rejecting the first convention, that in the opinion of the President and cabinet, its terms would not be satisfactory to the Senate. Whether this were according to strict official etiquette or not, can there be any doubt that the British Government were forced to give attention to this constitutional requisite in treating with the United States before entering into the second convention?

But last and most conclusive of all arguments, can any Englishman suggest any shadow of unfairness toward his country in this action of the United States Senate, in rejecting the second convention of January 14th, when in the very instrument itself, as well as in every other draft of a convention to which Mr. Johnson put his name on behalf of the United States, these words were made a part of the treaty: "The present treaty shall be ratified by the President of the United States, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate thereof"?

But notwithstanding all this, I think I hear some of our English liberal friends still objecting: "Perhaps this may be so, legally and formally, but we do not see how the American Senate could equitably and fairly accredit Mr. Reverdy Johnson to us by a unanimous vote, and then, when we strike hands with him, reject the treaty with an almost equal unanimity. It seems to us that they should have put us on our guard against giving him our confidence, and not have led us to think that they thought so differently of him from his namesake, the President, who had appointed him."

To which I reply: But how did the Senate know that Minister Johnson was going to run such a career as he did? Did they suppose that when he was instructed only to sound the British Government, he was about to take upon himself to settle the greatest foreign complication on the national docket? Did they suppose that Mr. Seward was going to abdicate his functions, and let the new envoy carry off the glory of composing a controversy which the Secretary of State had made it his chief study to manage for six years? Is it probable that they imagined that any settlement of the "Alabama" would be attempted by Mr. Seward himself in the dying hours of the Andrew Johnson Administration, when that administration had so recently come within one vote of being summarily deposed? Had not the British Minister at Washington attended the Impeachment proceeding? And were not his Government at home duly warned, before entering into either convention with Mr. Reverdy Johnson, that that Minister represented the most obnoxious Executive ever known to the American Republic?

If these questions are not enough to silence our murmuring English friends, I beg to ask three more:

First. Could the unanimous confirmation of Mr. Reverdy Johnson's nomination, by the United States Senate in July, have encouraged any false confidences, which were not sufficiently removed by the equally unanimous repudiation of his doings, in November, by the very administration which had originally proposed his nomination?

Secondly. If Mr. Thornton's report of the unanimous rejection by President Johnson and his cabinet of Minister Johnson's first treaty had not sufficiently opened Lord Clarendon's eyes in November, to the overweening confidence of the American envoy in the success of his mission, had not the Foreign Secretary's vision been made sufficiently clear on that point as early as April 5th-ten days before the Senate acted on the second treaty-when he notified the Minister, that "Her Majesty's Government could not consider a communication [from him] not made by the authority of the present [American] Government?

And lastly. Are the United States Senate any more to be blamed for repudiating Mr. Reverdy Johnson and his diplomacy, than was Andrew Johnson's Administration--which repudiation as we have seen was overlooked and deemed satisfactory by the British Government—or than was the British Foreign Secretary, who it seems repudiated both the one and the other, ten days sooner than the American Senate itself?

If the reader, in being kind enough to answer these questions for himself, will also kindly add, as I hope he will, that he will not trouble me for further justification of American fairness, either equitable or technical, in the matter of rejecting Mr. Reverdy Johnson's second treaty, I will relieve his much taxed patience by only asking his favorable verdict upon the following points, which embody the chief conclusions to which my argument has tended:

(1.) That our English opponents in the Johnson-Stanley, Johnson-Clarendon negotiations were well aware, from the outset of those negotiations, that no convention, however, strongly assented to by the American Minister in London, or approved of by the American Executive at home, could become a binding treaty upon the United States, till it had been duly ratified by the consent of the American Senate.

(2.) That there was nothing in the circumstances leading to the negotiation of the second convention of January 14th, or in the tenor of that convention itself, which even impliedly forbade the exercise by the Senate of its ordinary constitutional function of rejecting any treaty deemed unsatisfactory for the national good.

(3.) That the British Government, in dealing with the Administration of Andrew Johnson--especially after November 3, 1868, when the election of General Grant to the Presidency had set the seal of popular approval upon Impeachment proceedings, or at least of condemnation upon that Administration--were sufficiently put upon notice, that any important treaty concluded with that obnoxious Executive was more than ordinarily liable to Senatorial criticism and condemnation.

(4) That the convention of January 14th was rightly rejected, on its merits, by the United States Senate, as an entirely inadequate and insufficient submission to arbitration of the American grounds of claim in the "Alabama" controversy, either public or private, collective or individual.

(5.) That the United States Senate, in rejecting that treaty, rendered a favor to the British Government, itself, in preventing the further prosecution of a scheme of settlement so defective in its statement of the subject-matter of the dispute, and so totally devoid of any recognition of principle upon which satisfaction might thereafter be awarded or accepted.

(6.) That no discredit ought to attach to the United States from the extraordinary and unfounded reflections of its late Minister respecting the rejection of that treaty; because, as we have seen, he scarcely ever

at any time comprehended the nature and extent of his own powers, or if he did, rarely complied with them; because, having his first convention set aside for a violation of instructions, he sought to amend his second by an interpolation which was, if possible, a greater breach of official propriety, and which had to be repudiated by the British Government itself; because he accompanied that attempt to save his own work from disgrace with a concession which was at once unworthy of the suggestion of an American Minister, and at the same time, so far as appears, purely of his own invention; because he convicts himself, by his own showing, of having intentionally agreed to leave out a most important part of the American claim, under the device of omitting any specification of the point to be decided; because he considered himself fortunate in getting any mention at all of the claim he represented introduced into the terms of the treaty; and, finally, because his whole ministerial treatment of the American case was no better than "a mush of concession," and such as it is most charitable to believe resulted rather from ignorance or misappreciation of its merits, or from failing faculties, than from a deliberate purpose to sacrifice the great interests, national and international, which he undertook to represent.

PARIS, August 20.