(367) 
tically worthless, because not enforceable. Private efforts 
to obtain something by compromise, after long opportunity 
for trial, had proved mostly fruitless. In declaring by the 
treaty that claims and titles under Colonial grants should 
cease, New York extinguished nothing that was, or could be 
made, of any substantial value to the claimants except by 
negotiation ; and by that means, through Commissioners, 
she did secure for them a small salvage, which could not 
have been obtained in any other way. The treaty was not 
an injury but a benefit to the claimants, secured by the method 
their counsel had advocated three years before. 
It was upon this history and existing situation of the New 
York land-claims that the Legislature in 1789 and 1790 
authorized the treaty, and enacted that it should give rise to 
no claims of compensation against the State, except upon the 
fund it received from Vermont — a provision which, upon the 
above review, seems abundantly justified.* 
This situation was perfectly understood by the College trus- 
tees in 1814 ; for in 1805, and again in 1806, they had presented 
a petition to the Legislature for pecuniary aid, stating essen- 
tially the same facts as in the petition of 1814, except 
that their losses in Vermont were stated more prominently 
and more strongly. But aware of the Legislative exclusion 
* Considering that Columbia’s land-grants originally cost her almost noth- 
ing, the infirmities that attached to them and the absence of any prospect 
of benefit to be derived from them at the time of the treaty in 1790, the idea 
expressed by Dr. Moore, writing 56 years afterward, that by making the 
treaty the State gave the college ‘“‘a claim of retribution which all that the 
State has since done for it does not fully satisfy’’ (ante, p. 21), seems irra- 
tional and fanciful. 1 Kent’s Commentaries, 178, 
Between 1790 and 1814 the State had given the ieee in 1792, 1796, 1797 
and 1802 about $60,000 in land and money, and in 1814 and 1819, what was 
payne at $40,000 more, all of which Dr. Moore would apparently credit 
the State’s imagined debt of eee ” in part satisfaction of that 
eich The trustees in 1814, however, thought differently; for in their 
: : 
i 
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pensation” for losses in Vermont; and the grant of 1814 is in no way dis- 
tinguishable from those prior grants in its character or motive. 
