64 THE TREATY OF .WASHINGTON. 
“Such indirect claims as those for national losses stated in 
the Case presented on the part of the Government of the United 
States . . . should not be admitted in principle as growing out 
of the acts committed by particular vessels, alleged to have 
been enabled to commit depredations on the shipping of a bel- 
ligerent by reason of such want of due diligence in the per- 
formance of neutral obligations as that which is imputed by the 
United States to Great Britain :” 
which proposed agreement the preamble proceeds to 
state, in the form of two separate declarations,—one 
by Great Britain and one by the United States— 
each of them intelligible only by reference to pre- 
vious parts of the preamble: the whole to the con- 
clusion that the President shall make no claim, on 
the part of the United States, in respect of the indi- 
rect claims as aforesaid, before the Tribunal of Arbi- 
tration at Geneva. 
The Senate, thinking that the recitals in the pre- 
amble were not sufficiently explicit to furnish to the: 
United States satisfactory basis of transaction, pro- 
posed the following substitute : 
“Whereas both Governments adopt for the future the prin- 
ciple that claims for remote or indirect losses should not be 
admitted as the result of failure to observe neutral obligations, 
so far as to declare that it will hereafter guide the conduct of 
both Governments in their relations with each other. Now, 
therefore,” etc. 
But the Senate’s redaction of the article rendered 
its meaning too clear to be agreeable to the British 
Government, which, as was shrewdly said of it in 
Paris at the time, doubted whether release from claim 
of reparation for the present wrong done by Great 
