Before proceeding to consider the nature of existing obligations on the part of the United States, the Committee ask attention to three objections which they encounter on the threshold: the first, founded on the alleged antiquity of the original claims; the second, on the alleged character of the actual possessors; and the third, on the present condition of the country. I.--CLAIMS ANCIENT, BUT NOT STALE. It is said that the claims are ancient and stale, and therefore not to be entertained. It is true that the claims are the most ancient of any now pending, and that they date from the very origin of our existence as a nation. But in this respect they do not differ from a Revolutionary pension or a Revolutionary claim. Down to this day there is a standing committee of the Senate, entitled “Committee on Revolutionary Claims”; but if a claim traced to the Revolution must be rejected for staleness, there can be little use for this committee. If these claims, after uninterrupted sleep throughout the long intervening period, were now for the first time revived, they might be obnoxious to this imputation. But, as from the beginning of the century they have occupied the attention of Congress, and been sustained by speeches, reports, and votes, it is impossible to say that they have been allowed to sleep. The whole case was stated with admirable succinctness, as long ago as 1807, by Mr. Marion, of South Carolina, in the report of a committee of the House of Representatives. “From a mature consideration of the subject, and from the best judgment your Committee have been able to form on the case, _they are of opinion that this Government_, by expunging the second article of our Convention with France of the 30th September, 1800, _became bound to indemnify the memorialists for those just claims_ which they otherwise would rightfully have had on the Government of France, for the spoliations committed on their commerce by the illegal captures made by the cruisers and other armed vessels of that power, in violation of the Law of Nations, and in breach of treaties then existing between the two nations; which claims they were, by the rejection of the said article of the Convention, forever barred from preferring to the Government of France for compensation.”[111] Claims thus authoritatively stated at that early day cannot be overcome by any sleep.