206 A SAGA OF THE SEAS 
standing on the points of difference between the two countries to 
make his contribution to that end. This is my apology for ad- 
dressing you. 
The grave misunderstanding which has arisen between Great 
Britain and the United States is due to the widely different man- 
ner in which the Treaty of Washington has been from the outset 
interpreted by the two nations. I have not met a single person on 
this side of the Atlantic who expresses any desire “to back out” 
of the treaty, or refuse the fulfilment of any one of the obligations 
which it is believed to impose; nay, more, my conviction is that 
if the British people were satisfied that the principle of referring 
vague and indefinite claims to arbitration had somehow or other 
crept into the treaty, they yet would, while passing emphatic 
votes of censure on their representatives at Washington, at the 
same time never dream of calling back the pledge which Lord 
Ripon and his colleagues had given on their behalf. 
The excitement which followed the publication of the Ameri- 
can case was occasioned by the belief—universal among all classes 
of the English people—that their own interpretation of the treaty 
was the right one, and that indeed no other interpretation had 
ever been or would be given to it. It is desirable that Americans 
should remember this fact—that until the publication of the 
American case nobody on this side of the water had the remotest 
idea that the Washington Treaty contemplated more than arbi- 
tration with reference to the direct losses inflicted by the Alabama 
and other Confederate cruisers which escaped from British ports 
during our civil war. This is not a matter of surmise; it is demon- 
strable on the clearest evidence. I therefore contend that whether 
the public sentiment of England be well founded or not, its ex- 
istence is so natural that even if we Americans are wholly in the 
right we ought to make every allowance for it—in fact, treat it 
with generous forbearance. 
So early as June 12th last, when Lord Russell, in moving a 
resolution for the rejection of the treaty, charged the Americans 
with having made no concessions, Lord Granville retorted by 
pointing to the abandonment of the claim for consequential 
damages. “These were pretensions,’ he said, ‘which might have 
been carried out under the former arbitration, but they entirely 
disappear under the limited reference.’ There could be no mistake 
as to his meaning, because in describing the aforesaid ‘pretensions’ 
he quoted the strong and explicit language which Mr. Fish had 
