Democratic Sentinel, Volume 4, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 April 1880 — THE MOSROE DOCTRINE. [ARTICLE]

THE MOSROE DOCTRINE.

Report of the Committee on Foreign Relations. Representative Cox's report from the Committee on Foreign Affairs relative to the Interoceanic canal and Monroe doctrine, lately submitted to the House of Representatives, quotes at length from the President’s message upon the subject (of March 8, 1880), and severely arraigns the policy of Clayton in seeking to induce Great Britain to abandon her own unfounded claim upon the territory of an independent Spanish-American state, and inviting her to share with us the duty and privilege peculiarly our own of protecting an niteroceanic communication of infinite interest and concern to this country. Having blundered thus at the outset, the report says, he went into the moat complicated and ill-arranged geries of transactions, the final outcome of which was the treaty with Great Britain of April 19, 1850, known as the Clayton-Bulwer treaty. The report continues s “ Fortunately for the country, the Clayton-Bulwer treaty had scarcely come into operation before its fundamental provisions were violated by Great Britain by the firing upon the American steamer Prometheus, Nov. 21,1850, while ghe was going out of the port of San Juan de Nicaragua, by the Engligh brig of war Express, then lying in the port to enforce a British dominion over that part of Nicaragua.” Other similar infringements followed, the most conspicuous of these being the deliberate establishment by Great Britain, on the 17th of July, 1852, of a “new colony” in Central America, off the coast of Honduras, under the name of the Colony of the “Bay islands,” by and on account of which Mr. Cass, in the Senate in January, 1853, declared the treaty to have been virtually nullified by Great Britain. The report then details the negotiations and controversies between this Government and Great Britain growing out of these occurrences, and the ineffectual efforts to negotiate a new treaty, coming down to 1860, and continues: “ The outbreak, soon after this, of our unhappy domestic troubles and great civil war diverted public attention from Central American questions, and the ill-advised Clayton-Bulwer treaty was gradually suffered on both sides to lapse into an oblivion from which it has ffiut recently been evoked by persons disposed to controvert the policy and purposes of the United States with regard to any protectorate of life and property over any part of the Central American states on the isthmus. The circumstances in which this treaty was originally negotiated have been profoundly modified by the lapse of thirty years, and it appears to your committee to be entirely clear that, as an obstacle and possible peril in the way of a complete and pacific assertion of the sound, necessary, and vigorous American policy laid down in the President’s message of March 8, 1880, this treaty should now be finally and formally abrogated. It has been shown to have led only to great misunderstandings and controversies with the power with which we were unwisely led to make it.. It has always been equally inoperative either to guarantee the independence of Central American states or to advance the general interests of commerce. So long as it has even a formal shadow of existence it cannot but tend to cloud and obscure the perfectly simple, just and equitable policy of the United States in regard to interoceanic transit. Your com • mittee, therefore, recommend the passage of the following resolution: “ Resolved, By the Senate and House of Representatives assembled, That the President of the United States be and he is hereby respectfully requested, if the same in his opinion shall not be incompatible with public interest, to take immediate steps for the formal and final abrogation of the convention of April 19, 1850, between the United States of America and her Britannic Majesty, commonly called the ‘ ShipCanal Treaty,’ or ‘Clayton-Bulwer Treaty.’”