The undersigned has been instructed by His Excellency the President of the Republic to give the following answer: The Government never could be persuaded that Great Britain, in contempt of the negotiation opened on the subject and the alleged rights in the question of limits pending between the two countries, would want to use force in order to occupy the land that each side claims--much less after Mr. Wilson’s repeated assurance, which the Executive Power believes to have been most sincere, that those imputations had no foundation whatever, being, on the contrary, quite the reverse of the truth. Fully confident of this, and fortified by the protest embodied in the note referred to, the Government has no difficulty in declaring, as they do declare, that Venezuela has no intention of occupying or encroaching upon any portion of the territory the possession of which is in controversy; neither will she look with indifference on a contrary proceeding on the part of Great Britain. In furtherance of these declarations the English Government stipulated that it would not “order or sanction such occupations or encroachments on the part of the British authorities”; and Venezuela agreed on her part to “instruct the authorities of Venezuelan Guiana to refrain from taking any step which might clash with the engagement hereby made by the Government.” I suspect there was some justification on each side for the accusations afterward interchanged between the parties that this understanding or agreement, in its strict letter and spirit, had not been scrupulously observed. As we now pass from this incident to a date more than twenty-five years afterward, when attempts to negotiate for a settlement of the boundary controversy were resumed, it may be profitable, before going further, to glance at some of the conditions existing at the time of such resumption. II In 1876--thirty-two years after the discontinuance of efforts on the part of Great Britain and Venezuela to fix by agreement a line which should divide their possessions--Venezuela was confronted, upon the renewal of negotiations for that purpose, by the following conditions: The claim by her, of a divisional line, founded upon her conception of strict right, which her powerful opponent had insisted could not in any way be plausibly supported, and which therefore she would in no event accept. An indefiniteness in the limits claimed by Great Britain--so great that, of two boundary-lines indicated or suggested by her, one had been plainly declared to be “merely a preliminary measure open to future discussion between the Governments of Great Britain and Venezuela,” while the other was distinctly claimed to be based not on any acknowledgment of the republic’s rights, but simply upon generous concessions and a “desire to avoid all cause of serious controversies between the two countries.”