“Whereas claims have at various times since the exchange of the ratifications of the convention between Great Britain and the United States of America, signed at London on the 8th of February, 1853, been made upon the Government of her Britannic Majesty on the part of citizens of the United States, and upon the Government of the United States on the part of subjects of her Britannic Majesty; and whereas _some of such claims are still pending and remain unsettled_; her Majesty the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and the President of the United States of America, being of opinion that a speedy and equitable settlement of all such claims will contribute much to the maintenance of the friendly feelings which subsist between the two countries, have resolved to make arrangements for that purpose by means of a convention.”[51] The provisions of the treaty are for the trial of these cases. A commission is constituted, which is empowered to choose an arbitrator; but, in the event of a failure to agree, the arbitrator shall be determined “by lot” from two persons, one named by each side. Even if this aleatory proceeding were a proper device in the umpirage of private claims, it is strangely inconsistent with the solemnity which belongs to the present question. The moral sense is disturbed by such a process at any stage of the trial; nor is it satisfied by the subsequent provision for the selection of a sovereign or head of a friendly state as arbitrator. The treaty not merely makes no provision for the determination of the great question, but it seems to provide expressly that it shall never hereafter be presented. A petty provision for individual claims, subject to a set-off by the individual claims of England, so that in the end our country may possibly receive nothing, is the consideration for this strange surrender. I borrow a term from an English statesman on another occasion, if I call it a “capitulation.”[52] For the settlement of a few individual claims, we condone the original far-reaching and destructive wrong. Here are the plain words by which this is done:-- “The high contracting parties engage to consider the result of the proceedings of this commission as a full and final settlement of every claim upon either Government arising out of any transaction of a date prior to the exchange of the ratifications of the present convention; and further engage that every such claim, whether or not the same may have been presented to the notice of, made, preferred, or laid before the said commission, shall, from and after the conclusion of the proceedings of the said commission, be considered and treated as finally settled and barred, and thenceforth inadmissible.”