120 IN THE DIPLOMATIC SERVICE-XIV 



other disputant insisted that it referred to the Brazilians 

 and had no relation to the question with which we had to 

 deal. During two whole sessions this ground was fought 

 over in a legal way by these gentlemen, with great acu 

 men, the rest of us hardly putting in a word. 



At the beginning of the third session I ventured a re 

 monstrance, saying that it was a historical, and not a legal, 

 question ; that it could not possibly be settled by legal ar 

 gument; that the first thing to know was why the clause 

 was inserted in the treaty, and that the next thing was to 

 find, from the whole history leading up to it, who those 

 &quot;other persons &quot; thus vaguely referred to and left by the 

 Spaniards to the tender mercies of the Dutch might be; 

 and I insisted that this, being a historical question, must 

 be solved by historical experts. The commission acknow 

 ledged the justice of this; and on my nomination we 

 called to our aid Mr. George Lincoln Burr, professor of 

 history in Cornell University. It is not at all the very 

 close friendship which has existed for so many years 

 between us which prompts the assertion that, of all 

 historical scholars I have ever known, he is among the 

 very foremost, by his powers of research, his tenacity of 

 memory, his almost preternatural accuracy, his ability to 

 keep the whole field of investigation in his mind, and his 

 fidelity to truth and justice. He was set at the problem, 

 and given access to the libraries of Congress and of the 

 State Department, as also to the large collections of books 

 and maps which had been placed at the disposal of the com 

 mission. Of these the most important were those of Har 

 vard University and the University of Wisconsin. Curi 

 ous as it may seem, this latter institution, far in the interior 

 of our country, possesses a large and most valuable col 

 lection of maps relating to the colonization history of 

 South America. Within two weeks Professor Burr re 

 ported, and never did a report give more satisfaction. 

 He had unraveled, historically, the whole mystery, and 

 found that, the government of Brazil having played false 

 to both Spaniards and Dutch, Spain had allowed the 



