Our minister reported this transaction to his home government at Washington on the fourth day of November, 1887, and stated that the money demanded by Great Britain had been paid by Venezuela under protest.
Venezuela may have been altogether at fault in the transaction out of which this demand arose; the amount which England exacted may not have been unreasonable; and the method of its assessment, though not the most considerate possible, has support in precedent; and even the threat of a naval force may sometimes be justified in enforcing unheeded demands. I have not adverted to this incident for the purpose of inviting judgment on any of its phases, but only to call attention to the fact that it was allowed to culminate with seemingly studied accompaniments of ruthlessness and irritation, at a time when a boundary question was pending between the two nations, when the weaker contestant was importuning the stronger for arbitration, and when a desire for reconciliation and peace in presence of strained relations should have counseled considerateness and magnanimity—all this in haughty disregard of the solicitous and expressed desire of the Government of the United States to induce a peaceful adjustment of the boundary dispute, and in curt denial of our request that this especially disturbing incident should be relieved of its most exasperating features.
In the trial of causes before our courts, evidence is frequently introduced to show the animus or intent of litigating parties.
Perhaps strict decorum hardly permits us to adopt the following language, used by the Venezuelan minister when reporting to our Secretary of State the anticipated arrival of a British war-steamer to enforce the demand of Great Britain:
Such alarming news shows evidently that the Government of Her Britannic Majesty, encouraged by the impunity on which it has counted until now for the realization of its unjust designs with regard to Venezuela, far from procuring a pacific and satisfactory agreement on the different questions pending with the latter, is especially eager to complicate in order to render less possible every day that equitable solution which has been so fully the endeavor of my people.
On the fifteenth day of February, 1888, the Venezuelan minister, in communicating to our Government information he had received touching a decree of the governor of Demerara denying the validity of a contract entered into by the Government of Venezuela for the construction of a railway between certain points in the territory claimed by Venezuela, commented on the affair as follows:
England has at last declared emphatically that her rights are without limit, and embrace whatever regions may be suggested to her by her insatiate thirst for conquest. She even goes so far as to deny the validity of railway grants comprised within territory where not even the wildest dream of fancy had ever conceived that the day would come when Venezuela’s right thereto could be disputed. The fact is that until now England has relied upon impunity. She beholds in us a weak and unfriended nation, and seeks to make the Venezuelan coast and territories the base of a conquest which, if circumstances are not altered, will have no other bounds than the dictates of her own will.
V
Mr. Bayard, in a despatch transmitting this to our minister to England, says that our Government has heretofore acted upon the assumption that the boundary controversy between Great Britain and Venezuela was one based on historical facts, which without difficulty could be determined according to evidence, but that the British pretension now stated gives rise to grave disquietude, and creates the apprehension that their territorial claim does not follow historical traditions or evidence, but is apparently indefinite. He refers to the British Colonial Office list of previous years, and calls attention to the wide detour to the westward in the boundaries of British Guiana between the years 1877 and 1887, as shown in that record. He suggests that our minister “express anew to Lord Salisbury the great gratification it would afford our Government to see the Venezuelan dispute amicably and honorably settled by arbitration or otherwise,” and adds: “If indeed it should appear that there is no fixed limit to the British boundary claim, our good disposition to aid in a settlement might not only be defeated, but be obliged to give place to a feeling of grave concern.”