Richard Olney of Boston, a lawyer of exceptional ability and of the highest professional standing, was then Secretary of State. His Venezuela dispatch, however, was one of the most undiplomatic documents ever issued by the Department of State. He did not confine himself to a statement of his case, wherein any amount of vigor would have been permissible, but ran his unpracticed eye unnecessarily over the whole field of American diplomacy. "That distance and three thousand miles of intervening ocean make any permanent political union between a European and an American state unnatural and inexpedient," may have been a philosophic axiom to many in Great Britain as well as in the United States, but it surely did not need reiteration in this state paper, and Olney at once exposed himself to contradiction by adding the phrase, "will hardly be denied." Entirely ignoring the sensitive pride of the Spanish Americans and thinking only of Europe, he continued: "Today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition." The President himself did not run into any such uncalled-for extravagance of expression, but his statement of the American position did not thereby lose in vigor. When he had received the reply, of the British Government refusing to recognize the interest of the United States in the case, Cleveland addressed himself, on December 17, 1895, to Congress. In stating the position of the Government of the United States, he declared that to determine the true boundary line was its right, duty, and interest. He recommended that the Government itself appoint a commission for this purpose, and he asserted that this line, when found, must be maintained as the lawful boundary. Should Great Britain continue to exercise jurisdiction beyond it, the United States must resist by every means in its power. "In making these recommendations I am fully alive to the responsibility incurred, and keenly realize all the consequences that may follow." Yet "there is no calamity which a great nation can invite which equals that which follows a supine submission to wrong and injustice and the consequent loss of national self-respect and honor beneath which axe shielded and defended a people's safety and greatness."