If we may judge from our national history, there is no reason to doubt that these claims, if not released by our Government, would have been fully satisfied by France afterwards. It is in the nature of claims on foreign powers to seem desperate. Such was the case, as is well remembered, with the claims on Denmark, on Spain, and on Naples; but all these have been paid. _No just claim by the American Government can be desperate._ What claims could seem more desperate than those under the arbitrary, wide-spreading edicts of Napoleon Bonaparte in his pride of place? But President Jackson, when Louis Philippe had become King, made an appeal, as he expressed it, “to the justice and magnanimity of regenerated France,”[246] and even these claims, accruing under a Government which had ceased to exist, were satisfied. The claims in question had as much intrinsic equity, and were more intimately associated with the national sentiments. Asserting that they would have been paid, the Committee are sustained not only by the reason of the case, but by the judgment of the disinterested historian of our country, who thus concludes his account of the Convention of 1800, and its final ratification with the proviso of the First Consul:-- “Had the treaty been ratified in its original shape, the sufferers by the spoliations of the French might, perhaps, before now, have obtained that indemnity from the French Government which they have ever since been asking of their own, but which has hitherto been unjustly withheld.”[247] There is no statute of limitations between nations; so that these claims would have been as valid against France in 1831 as they unquestionably were in 1800. A nation like the United States has only “to bide its time,” and the day of justice will come. Indeed, President Jackson, when dwelling on the negotiations with France in 1831, bore testimony to the vitality of American claims on foreign powers, when he said that the new Convention would be “an encouragement for perseverance in the demands of justice, by this new proof, that, if steadily pursued, they will be listened to, and admonition will be offered to those powers, if any, which may be inclined to evade them, _that they will never be abandoned_.”[248] These words of Andrew Jackson are a sufficient answer to the present objection. ALL OBJECTIONS ANSWERED. Such are the objections to the responsibility of the United States. The Committee believe that they have all been answered, so that the claims stand above impeachment or question, as a debt to be liquidated and paid. It only remains to consider what sum should be appropriated for this purpose. JUST COMPENSATION.