In execution of the powers so conveyed the said Thomas F. Bayard,
William L. Putnam, and James B. Angell, in the month of November last,
met in this city the plenipotentiaries of Her Britannic Majesty and
proceeded in the negotiation of a treaty as above authorized. After many
conferences and protracted efforts an agreement has at length been
arrived at, which is embodied in the treaty which I now lay before you.
The treaty meets my approval, because I believe that it supplies a
satisfactory, practical, and final adjustment, upon a basis honorable
and just to both parties, of the difficult and vexed question to which
it relates.
A review of the history of this question will show that all former
attempts to arrive at a common interpretation, satisfactory to both
parties, of the first article of the treaty of October 20, 1818, have
been unsuccessful, and with the lapse of time the difficulty and
obscurity have only increased.
The negotiations in 1854 and again in 1871 ended in both cases in
temporary reciprocal arrangements of the tariffs of Canada and
Newfoundland and of the United States, and the payment of a money award
by the United States, under which the real questions in difference
remained unsettled, in abeyance, and ready to present themselves anew
just so soon as the conventional arrangements were abrogated.
The situation, therefore, remained unimproved by the results of the
treaty of 1871, and a grave condition of affairs, presenting almost
identically the same features and causes of complaint by the United
States against Canadian action and British default in its correction,
confronted us in May, 1886, and has continued until the present time.
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