Jasper County Democrat, Volume 2, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 July 1899 — MUST ARBITRATE OR FIGHT. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

MUST ARBITRATE OR FIGHT.

Premier Laurier’s Remarkable View of Alaska f outidary Dispute. In the Canadian Commons Saturday Sir Charles Tupper brought up the question of the .Alaskaii boundary. He said that the United States, in refusing to submit the subject to arbitration, well justified the decision Great Britain and Canada had reached iu declining to allow the question to go before the joint high commission. He believed that, the Government and commissioners of the United States had lost confidence in their own claims to this strip of disputed territory. Sir Charles suggested a bill providing for the protection of British ami Canadian interests by enacting that no license to mine in the Yukon district shall be granted to any other than a British subject. Premier Laurier, in reply, syippathized with much that Sir Charles Tupper had said. He stated that he had little hope now of a Compromise, and was very sorry to say that the negotiations had not advanced the position one iota from that of January last. The alternatives, he gravely stated, were arbitration or war. Arbitration, he emphatically declared, must come, and al-

though nn agreement upon the terms of arbitration had n- t yet been reaehi’d. he held that. Canada’s -wisest course was to fuither patience and forbearance. A Washington dispatch says that the statement of Premier Laurier in the Canadian House of Commons that there are two alternatives regarding the Alaskan boundary dispute, arbitration or war, is regarded in Washington as only another bluff for Canadian home consumption. The United Slates has been in possession of the territory in dispute for a generation. The United States has only to say, in Sir "Wilfrid’s ancestral language, “Je suis: je reste”—l am here; I stay here—and then what is Sir Wilfrid going to do about it?

PREMIER LAURIER.