person to act merely in assessing the amount of damages when an arbiter had been provided to decide between him and the commissioner on the part of the United States, but to have authorized him to decide upon the original justice of the claim against his own Government would have been a novelty.  The American commissioner is as pure and honest a man as I have ever known, but I think he took a wrong view of his powers under the convention.

The principle of the liability of Paraguay having been established by the highest political acts of the United States and that Republic in their sovereign capacity, the commissioners, who would seem to have misapprehended their powers, have investigated and undertaken to decide whether the Government of the United States was right or wrong in the authority which they gave to make war if necessary to secure the indemnity.  Governments may be, and doubtless often have been, wrong in going to war to enforce claims; but after this has been done, and the inquiry which led to the reclamations has been acknowledged by the Government that inflicted it, it does not appear to me to be competent for commissioners authorized to ascertain the indemnity for the injury to go behind their authority and decide upon the original merits of the claim for which the war was made.  If a commissioner were appointed under a convention to ascertain the damage sustained by an American citizen in consequence of the capture of a vessel admitted by the foreign government to be illegal, and he should go behind the convention and decide that the original capture was a lawful prize, it would certainly be regarded as an extraordinary assumption of authority.

The present appears to me to be a case of this character, and for these reasons I have deemed it advisable to submit the whole subject for the consideration of the Senate.

JAMES BUCHANAN.

WASHINGTON, February 21, 1861.

To the Senate of the United States: 

The treaty concluded between Great Britain and the United States on the 15th of June, 1846, provided in its first article that the line of boundary between the territories of Her Britannic Majesty and those of the United States from the point on the forty-ninth parallel of north latitude up to which it had already been ascertained should be continued westward along the said parallel “to the middle of the channel which separates the continent from Vancouvers Island, and thence southerly through the middle of said channel and of Fucas Straits to the Pacific Ocean.”  When the commissioners appointed by the two Governments to mark the boundary line came to that point of it which is required to run southerly through the channel which divides the continent from Vancouvers Island, they differed entirely in their opinions, not only concerning the true point of deflection from the forty-ninth parallel, but also as to the channel intended to be designated in the treaty.  After a long-continued