the withdrawal should be from this hemisphere including provinces and islands."

An astounding suggestion it seems, and coming from the chairman of the committee which would have to pass upon any treaty for which they might pave the way, not an encouragement to further parley along the lines which the negotiations had in view; but Fish and Rose, with Grant's fixed approval, took no account of Sumner's comment and went ahead with their arrangements without considering impossible demands.

The British Minister submitted a proposal for the appointment of a Joint High Commission, to be composed of members to be named by each Government, to hold its session at Washington, and to treat and discuss the mode of settling the different questions which had arisen out of the fisheries, as well as those affecting the relations of the United States toward the British possessions in North America. Fish, backed by Grant, insisted that the Alabama question should be within the scope of discussion and settlement by the commission, and the British Government assented.

Grant, on February 9, 1871, nominated as commissioners on the part of the United States: Hamilton Fish, Secretary of State; Robert C. Schenck, Minister to Great Britain; Samuel Nelson, Associate

Justice of the Supreme Court; Ebenezer R. Hoar, of Massachusetts; George H. Williams, of Oregon. If it had not been for Sumner's unreasonableness and Motley's petulance, the historian of the Dutch Republic might well have been a member of the commission, thus adding luster to his fine career.

The British members were: Earl de Grey and Ripon, a member of Gladstone's Cabinet; Sir Stafford Northcote, a conservative leader in Parliament; Sir Edward Thornton, British Minister in Washington; Professor Montague Bernard, of Oxford University; and Sir John A. Macdonald, the Premier of Canada.

Within six weeks the British and American Joint High Commission were at work in Washington upon the treaty. When it was laid before the Senate, on the 10th of May, Sumner was no longer at the head of the Committee upon the chairmanship of which he set such store. He had been deposed in March, for reasons not directly bearing on the negotiations with Great Britain, though, as it seems to-day, the ratification of a treaty was so vital to the maintenance of friendly relations with Great Britain, that the unprecedented action of the Senate might have been justified by that alone.

Shorn of his place Sumner accepted the treaty with reasonable grace. It was ratified in due course on May 24, 1871. The principle of arbitration in in

/ternational disputes had won its first great triumph. Great Britain appointed as its arbitrator Chief Justice Alexander Cockburn; the United States, Charles Francis Adams. The King of Italy, the President of the Swiss Confederation, and the Emperor of Brazil named three neutral arbitrators. Lord Tenterden was the British agent and Sir Roundell Palmer the counsel. J. C. Bancroft Davis, Assistant Secretary of State, was agent for the United States. The American counsel were William M. Evarts, Caleb Cushing, and Morrison R. Waite.

The Board of Arbitration met at Geneva, on December 15, 1871, and in the following September it had done its work. But even to the very last the shadow of Sumner's "massive grievance" and "indirect claims" hung over it threatening in the crudeness of the manner of their presentation more than once to bring the arbitration to a futile end. Had it not been for the firmness, tact, and diplomatic comprehension of Charles Francis Adams the arbitration would have broken on those issues. On September 2, by a vote of four to one at the twenty-ninth conference, the tribunal decided to award in gross the sum of $15,500,000, to be paid in gold by Great Britain to the United States for the damage done by the Florida, Alabama, and Shenandoah. Cockburn alone dissented.

Thus Grant must have the credit for establishing the principle of arbitration in international disputes; for this was brought about by reason of the firmness with which he held to the validity of American demands. If anywhere along the line his conduct had been marked by vacillation, the result could not have been achieved. To him must also go the credit of being among the earliest to encourage the principle of a World's Congress, as afterwards embodied in the Hague Tribunal, when to the Arbitration Union in Birmingham he said: "Nothing would afford me greater happiness than to know that, as I believe will be the case, at some future day, the nations of the earth will agree upon some sort of congress, which will take cognizance of international questions of difficulty, and whose decisions will be as binding as the decisions of our Supreme Court are upon us. It is a dream of mine that some such solution may be."

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE SAN DOMINGO TRAGEDY

IN the geography of the Western Hemisphere Hayti and San Domingo are insignificant. Among the Latin American republics they cut no figure; yet they have had influence on the politics of the United States quite out of keeping with their own importance. It is a rare administration which passes without unhappy experience with one or the other of these misadventures in negro self-government. Grant found in San Domingo a tragedy of his career - his first unqualified defeat.

Although once nominally united, the two sections of the island had been independent revolutionary centers for twenty-five years. Hayti, originally under the control of France, occupied a third of the island and had four fifths of the population. San Domingo, which had been a colony of Spain, though sparsely settled, furnished frequent rotations in its crops of insurrection. For some years, two leaders, Baez and Cabral, had taken turns at being president, sometimes through violence tempered by a popular primary, sometimes through violence alone.

Baez at the time was called by enemies of Grant