Congress at once acceded to Cleveland's wishes and appropriated $100,000 for the proposed investigation. For a brief moment neither Great Britain nor America quite realized the meaning of the President's warlike utterance. In America it had generally been felt previously that his foreign policy was conciliatory rather than aggressive and, besides, the Venezuelan dispute had but little occupied popular attention. When it became evident that war was a definite possibility, public interest followed every step with anxiety. Newspaper sentiment divided. The press generally judged Cleveland's stand strong and "American." On the other hand, a few periodicals like the _Nation_ insinuated that the President was actuated by the desire to make political capital for a third term campaign and characterized his action as "criminally rash and insensate," "ignorant and reckless," "impudent and insulting." Influential citizens in both countries made energetic attempts to prevent anything that might make war inevitable. The Prince of Wales and Lord Roseberry threw their influence on the side of conciliation. A.J. Balfour declared that a conflict with the United States would carry something of the "horror of civil war" and looked forward to the time when the country would "feel that they and we have a common duty to perform, a common office to fulfill among the nations of the world." The President appointed a commission which set to work to obtain the information necessary for a judicial settlement of the boundary, and both Great Britain and Venezuela tactfully expressed a readiness to cooperate. Their labors, however, were brought to a close by a treaty between the two disputants providing for arbitration. A prominent feature of the treaty was an agreement that fifty years' control or settlement of an area should be sufficient to constitute a title, a provision which withdrew from consideration much of the territory to which Venezuela had laid claim. In October, 1899, the arbitration was concluded. The award did not meet the extreme claims of either party, but gave Great Britain the larger share of the disputed area, although assigning the entire mouth of the Orinoco River to Venezuela. Besides giving new life to the Monroe doctrine as an integral part of our foreign policy, the incident served to illustrate the dangers of settling international disputes in haphazard fashion. In January, 1897, therefore, Secretary Olney and the British Ambassador at Washington, Sir Julian Pauncefote, negotiated a general treaty for the settlement of disputes between the two countries by arbitration. Even with the example of the possible consequences of the Venezuelan controversy before it, however, the Senate failed to see the necessity for such an expedient, defeated the treaty by a narrow margin and left the greatest problem of international relations--the settlement of controversies on the basis of justice rather than force--to the care of a future generation.