I think this brief epitome of Mr. Reverdy Johnson's constructive expansion and contraction of his ministerial functions must have satisfied the reader that, if Mr. Johnson is no better a judge of the merits of his country's claims against England for her unneutral conduct during the late civil war, than he is of his own powers to treat with that Government for the settlement of those claims, his aspersion that we have obtained by his convention all that we have ever asked, and that the Government of the United States had, in effect, no case to begin with, is already well-nigh disposed of.

Before dropping this branch of my subject, however, I must remark in passing, that Mr. Reverdy Johnson's transgression of his instructions cannot for a moment be urged against us by the British Government in any future negotiations upon the same subject, because, by the very terms of the two conventions which the British Foreign Secretaries signed with him, that Government expressly admitted its obligation to inform itself of the extent of the envoy's powers. Thus, it makes a part of the recitals of both of the conventions of November 10th and January 14th, as well as of several other preliminary drafts between the negotiators, that "the Plenipotentiaries having communicated to each other their respective full powers, found in good and due form, have agreed as follows."

So, besides the holding back by Lord Clarendon on the subject of interpolating "Governmental claims" into the treaty, through caution of Mr. Johnson's defective powers to agree to that change, as already referred to, it is noticeable that Lord Stanley, after signing the convention of November 10th with Mr. Johnson, expressed to the British Minister at Washington his misgivings of Mr. Johnson's authority to bind his Government. Writing to Mr. Thornton after that convention had been repudiated by President Johnston's cabinet, and for the purpose, as he states, of putting upon record his own doings as Foreign Secretary in that particular, he says:

[Stanley to Thornton, December 8, Blue Book ut sup., p. 19.]

"Matters remained in this state until the receipt of your telegram of the 27th of November, up to which time I was under the impression, which was also shared in by Mr. Johnson, that the Convention which had been signed, being in accordance with his instructions as construed by him, would meet with the approval of the United States Government."

Is not this significant phrase "as construed by him," a full admission that the British Government took their chance of Mr. Johnson's work being disowned, as his first convention was, for disregard of instructions? Does it not also lead one to think that both the British Foreign Secretaries-Lord Stanley, first, and Lord Clarendon,

afterward-must have had their eyes opened to Mr. Johnson's distorted conception of his ministerial capacity, before concluding any of the negotiations which they respectively arranged with him? In fact, can there be much doubt that, when the late Minister's whole proceedings are taken into account, our English friends must have understood Mr. Reverdy Johnson much better than he did himself?

But I pass from Mr. Reverdy Johnson's incapacity to understand his official functions, to consider the truth of his reflection upon his country's cause, that his diplomacy had gained for his Government all that it had ever asked, and that it never had a claim of its own to present.

Here I must again call Minister Johnson as a witness against himself. Lord Stanley, who kept a record of his dealings with the American envoy, as before alluded to, thus sets down the particulars of one of his earliest interviews with him:

In a conversation which took place at the Foreign Office on the 25th of September, Mr. Johnson, after discussing with me the subject of Naturalization, passed to that of the so-called "Alabama" claims. In this conversation, of which a memorandum is inclosed, extracted from my notes of the interview, Mr. Johnson first suggested, as a means of settlement, the payment of a lump sum of money, or a cession of territory by Great Britain, both of which plans I considered inadmissible, so long as the question of the liability of Great Britain was denied by us, and remained undecided.-(Parl. Blue Book, ut sup., p. 17.)

The memorandum referred to is given on p. 19 of the Blue Book, and is substantially to the same effect:

The conversation then turned on the "Alabama" claims. Mr. Johnson adverted generally, though not in the form of distinct proposals, to various methods by which this question might be settled. His first suggestion was the payment of a lump sum of money. Lord Stanley at once declared this to be inadmissible, so long as the question of our being liable at all was denied by us and undecided by any mode of reference. Mr. Johnson then talked of some cession of territory, an idea which Lord Stanley did not think more promising.

I think Mr. Johnson can hardly contend that his two conventions either stipulated for the payment of "a lump sum of money," or "the cession of territory." How, then, can the United States be said "to have obtained by them all that we have ever asked"? Had not the American Minister heard from some source or other, before starting on his mission, that one or the other of these modes of settlement was expected? Or, was the suggestion entirely spontaneous, and (may it not be added) unauthorized, with himself? Then, does not "cession of territory” imply the satisfaction of a national demand? Or, was Mr. Johnson imagining all the while, that each one of the sufferers by the "Alabama" or the "Florida was to take a town ship in Canada as an indemnity for the loss of his ship? The same

idea of cession of territory in satisfaction of these claims crops out elsewhere in the course of this correspondence. Thus, Mr. Thornton, writing to Lord Clarendon, under date of April 19th (Ib., p. 53), says, [this]"mode of settlement [that is, by cession of territory] has frequently been hinted at to me."

Whether such a form of indemnity is a desirable or expedient one for the United States, or whether indeed the cession of territory has any legitimate connection with the solution of the Alabama question at all, it is quite superfluous for the writer to undertake to settle. But, that the agitation of such a demand, and by Mr. Johnson himself, when freshly arrived in England, quite contradicts his assertions, that " we have obtained all that we ever asked," and that "the Government [of the United States] never exacted anything on its own account," seems to the writer too plain for further comment.

I hasten to the more substantial matter of the total abandonment by Mr. Johnson, and (I must add) by Mr. Seward, of the national ground of complaint against Great Britain, connected with the matter of the Belligerent Recognition of the Rebel Confederacy, and of which all tangible notice is omitted in both of the Conventions of November 10th and January 14th. Here I think every American who has gone to the bottom of the Alabama controversy will agree with me, that the United States Senate were fully justified in repudiating Messrs. Seward's and Johnson's diplomatic doings in toto.

How stands this point of Belligerent Recognition as left in the latest convention, and as dwelt upon in preceding negotiations which led to it? I fear that I shall have to tax the reader's patience with some explanatory details on this head; yet I believe it unavoidable to a just understanding of the merits of the discussion.

Doubtless he will have observed no allusion to Belligerent Recognition in Mr. Seward's original instructions to Mr. Johnson of July 20th, which I have already quoted: nor, I may add, am I aware that Mr. Seward ever afterward so much as alludes to the subject throughout the whole correspondence, as published in the blue books of either country. This is significant, at the outset. Yet it is the same Mr. Seward who during the course of the civil war had made no less than six formal demands as American Secretary of State upon the Governments of England and France for the recall of that obnoxious measure; and the same Mr. Seward who had a hundred times at least denounced to those Governments their hasty and unfriendly recognition of the rebels as a belligerent power, as the fountain and source of all our foreign woes. Was it intentionally kept out of

sight, or virtually ignored, in these Johnson-Stanley and JohnsonClarendon conventions, in order to effect some arrangement which should have the éclat of disposing of a great international controversy ?

In reply to this question, and at the same time to meet Mr. Johnson's thrust that we should have got by his convention all that we ever asked for, I beg the reader to go no further back with me into the record of Mr. Seward's complaints about the national reparation expected from England for her hasty recognition of the rebels as belligerents, than six months prior to Mr. Reverdy Johnson's confirmation as Minister. Here is what the American Secretary of State authorized Mr. Johnson's predecessor, Mr. Adams, to say to the British Government in January, 1868. I only quote an extract:

SIR: Your dispatch of the 24th of December, No. 1,503, has been received. You were quite right in saying to Lord Stanley that the negotiation in regard to the so-called Alabama claims is now considered by this Government to have been closed without a prospect of its being reopened. With reference to the conversation which occurred between yourself and his lordship on the subject of a recent dispatch of Mr. Ford [British Secretary of Legation at Washington], in which Mr. Ford gave an account of a conversation which he had with me, it would perhaps be sufficient to say that Mr. Ford submitted no report of that conversation, nor did be inform me what he proposed to write to Lord Stanley. I may add that either Mr. Ford or Lord Stanley, or both, have misapprehended the full scope of what is reported by Mr. Ford as a suggestion on my part.

Both of these gentlemen seem to have understood me as referring only to mutual pecuniary war claims of citizens and subjects of the two countries which have lately been extensively discussed. Lord Stanley seems to have resolved that the so-called Alabama claims shall be treated so exclusively as a pecuniary commercial claim, as to insist on altogether excluding the proceedings of Her Majesty's Government in regard to the war from consideration in the arbitration which he proposed.

On the other hand, I have been singularly unfortunate in my correspondence, if I have not given it to be clearly understood, that a violation of neutrality by the Queen's proclamation, and kindred proceedings of the British Government, is regarded as a national wrong and injury to the United States; and that the lowest form of satisfaction for that national injury that the United States could accept, would be found in an indemnity, without reservation or compromise, by the British Government to those citizens of the United States who had suffered individual injury and damages by the vessels of war unlawfully built, equipped, manned, fitted out, or entertained and protected in the British ports and harbors, in consequence of a failure of the British Government to preserve its neutrality.

C. F. ADAMS, Esq., &c., &c.

WM. H. SEWARD.

This, I venture to think, is a very moderate and just statement of the American claim, and one which will never be substantially departed from by the country in any settlement of the question hereafter to be arranged. Had Mr. Reverdy Johnson never heard of it? Does either of his conventions recognize "a national wrong and injury," or provide for its "indemnity without reservation or compromise" "to

those who have suffered individual injury"? Let us look a little more closely at Mr. Johnson's dealings with Belligerent Recognition, since, as we have seen, Mr. Seward keeps an ominous silence in regard to it.

So far as I can find, the only mention at any time of the subject just named, on Mr. Johnson's part, occurred in one of his early interviews with Lord Stanley, prior to the signing of the convention of November 10th, and is thus reported by Lord Stanley in a dispatch to Mr. Thornton, under date of October 21st. The negotiation of the first convention, it would seem from one of Mr. Johnson's own letters, was about this time just being entered upon;

In this conversation little was said as to the point on which the former negotiations broke off, viz.: the claim made by the United States Government to raise before the arbiter the question of the alleged premature recognition by Her Majesty's Government of the Confederates as belligerents. I stated to Mr. Reverdy Johnson that we could not, on this point, depart from the position which we had taken up; but I saw no impossibility in so framing the reference, and that by mutual consent, either tacit or express, the difficulty might be avoided.—Blue Book, ut sup, p. 10.

As the subject is dropped from this time forth by the American envoy, so far as can be learned from the published correspondence of either Government, are we to conclude that the British proposition was at once submitted to, and that that Government, being no longer importuned to depart from its position, it was henceforth mutually agreed between the two negotiators to concert "how not to do it"? Whether such an agreement was avowedly ever entered into by them or not, it is plain that it was most effectively carried out, so far as the American Minister was concerned, by the convention of November 10th, the terms of which, so far as this point is concerned, I am about to cite. Meanwhile, I must not deprive the reader of Mr. Johnson's report of his own doings on that head to the Department of State, showing that Lord Stanley's ingenious device was, at least, not unfavorably entertained by him. Says Mr. Johnson, writing home to Mr. Seward, under date of the very day of signing the first convention (November 10th), and expressing his own gratification at what he had achieved:

It is proper that I should give, as briefly as may be necessary, my reasons for assenting to the convention, or rather to some of its provisions: 1. You have heretofore refused to enter into an agreement to arbitrate the Alabama claims unless this Government would agree that the question of its right to acknowledge as belligerents the late so-called Southern Confederacy be also included within the arbitration. You will see by the terms of the first and the fourth articles, that that question, as well as every other which the United States may think is involved in such claims, is to be before the commissioners or the arbitrator. This is done by the use of general terms, and the omission of any specification of the questions to be decided. And my authority for agreeing to this is found in your original instructions of the 20th of July last, and is indeed to be found in the correspondence between yourself and my predecessor regarding these claims,-N. Y, Times, ut sup.