THE INTEROCEANIC CANAL PROBLEM 157 



fledged colony, and to the unlawful extensions of the boun- 

 dary of this British possession. Lord Granville furnished an 

 historical account of Belize, showing that while originally the 

 occupation of this territory by Englishmen was maintained 

 under the sovereign laws of Spain, yet by conquest it had 

 subsequently become English territory, as acknowledged by 

 Spain, and later by the Central American states. All these 

 acts, which secured to Great Britain the sovereignty over her 

 Central American territory, had been committed before 1850. 

 In that year, and while the Clay ton-Bui wer treaty was awaiting 

 ratification, Mr. Clayton, the Secretary of State, acknowledged 

 this British possession. Finally, to close the discussion, Lord 

 Granville pointed to the postal convention of 1869, between 

 Great Britain and the United States, which formally recog- 

 nized British Honduras as a " colony " of Great Britain. 



Mr. Frelinghuysen returned to the discussion, and the con- 

 troversy with Lord Granville was urged along, though with 

 signs of diminishing vigor on the part of the United States. 

 Nothing new was developed in what might be termed this 

 supplementary correspondence, the old lines of argument 

 were preserved, and the same facts reiterated. The end of the, 

 debate was only brought about when the line of argumemj 

 returned once more to Mr. Frelinghuysen's former charge of 

 Great Britain's bad faith in creating a "colony " in Honduras 

 since the ratification of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty. Lord 

 Granville's curt reply to this repeated assertion was simply 

 that the United States, through its official mouthpiece, had 

 expressed its satisfaction and recognized English rights in 

 Honduras. The Monroe Doctrine, which had crept into the 

 discussion, he dismissed with a query, Why had it not 

 applied during the past thirty years ? If the defenders of the 

 Monroe Doctrine could accept the Clayton-Bulwer treaty in 

 1850, they could equally recognize it in 1883. 



The only effect of this two years' controversy was to i \ 

 establish all the more firmly the validity of the Clayton- \* 

 Bulwer treaty. Whatever ills its provisions may have im- 

 posed upon the United States, there was no escape from 

 the treaty through the avenues of logic or by recourse to 



