INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS 207 
employed. We are bound to believe that Lord Granville spoke in 
perfect good faith, especially as the American minister was present 
during the debate, and sent the newspaper verbatim report of it 
to his own government by the ensuing mail. When the debate 
took place the ratification of the treaty had not been exchanged. 
If Lord Granville was in error, why did not General Schenck cor- 
rect him? 
On the same occasion the Marquis of Ripon, also replying to 
Lord Russell’s taunt, remarked that ‘so far from our conduct be- 
ing a constant course of concession, there were, as my noble 
friend behind me [Earl Granville] has said, numerous occasions 
on which it was our duty to say that the proposals made to us 
were such as it was impossible for us to think of entertaining.’ 
This, also, was understood to refer to the indirect claims. 
Turning to the debate which took place in the House of Com- 
mons on the 4th of August, one searches in vain for any remark in 
the speeches of Mr. Gladstone, Sir Stafford Northcote, or Sir 
Roundell Palmer which indicated any suspicion that the Alabama 
claims had assumed the portentous character which now attaches 
to them. The doubt which Lord Cairns at one time entertained 
had been set at rest by the ministerial explanations made at the 
time in the House of Lords, and not a single argument advanced 
in the Lower House, either in support of or in opposition to the 
treaty, touched upon the question of these claims. Even Mr. 
Baillie Cochrane, the well-known Conservative member, who 
denounced the treaty on all sorts of grounds, and whose avowed 
object was to pick as many holes in it as possible, was unable to 
allege that England had consented to an arbitration which might 
involve her in indefinite liabilities. 
Sir Stafford Northcote, in the course of his humorous speech— 
a speech instinct with good feeling towards the United States— 
said that ‘a number of the claims under the convention which was 
not adopted [the Johnson-Clarendon Treaty] were so vague that 
it would have been possible for the Americans to have raised a 
number of questions which the commissioners were unwilling to 
submit to arbitration. They might have raised the question with 
regard to the recognition of belligerency, with regard to construc- 
tive damages arising out of the recognition of belligerency, and a 
number of other matters which this country could not admit. 
But if honorable gentlemen would look to the terms of the treaty 
actually contracted they would see that the commissioners fol- 
