has shown to be the natural consequence of the proximity of a strong power to a weak one.  These positions depended upon, indeed their tenure originated in, the possession of Jamaica, thus justifying Cromwell’s forecast.  Of them, the Belize, a strip of coast two hundred miles long, on the Bay of Honduras, immediately south of Yucatan, was so far from the Isthmus proper, and so little likely to affect the canal question, that the American negotiator was satisfied to allow its tenure to pass unquestioned, neither admitting nor denying anything as to the rights of Great Britain thereto.  Its first occupation had been by British freebooters, who “squatted” there a very few years after Jamaica fell.  They went to cut logwood, succeeded in holding their ground against the efforts of Spain to dislodge them, and their right to occupancy and to fell timber was allowed afterwards by treaty.  Since the signature of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, this “settlement,” as it was styled in that instrument, has become a British “possession,” by a convention with Guatemala contracted in 1859.  Later, in 1862, the quondam “settlement” and recent “possession” was erected, by royal commission, into a full colony, subordinate to the government of Jamaica.  Guatemala being a Central American state, this constituted a distinct advance of British dominion in Central America, contrary to the terms of our treaty.

A more important claim of Great Britain was to the protectorate of the Mosquito Coast,—­a strip understood by her to extend from Cape Gracias a Dios south to the San Juan River.  In its origin, this asserted right differed little from similar transactions between civilized man and savages, in all times and all places.  In 1687, thirty years after the island was acquired, a chief of the aborigines there settled was carried to Jamaica, received some paltry presents, and accepted British protection.  While Spanish control lasted, a certain amount of squabbling and fighting went on between the two nations; but when the questions arose between England and the United States, the latter refused to acquiesce in the so-called protectorate, which rested, in her opinion, upon no sufficient legal ground as against the prior right of Spain, that was held to have passed to Nicaragua when the latter achieved its independence.  The Mosquito Coast was too close to the expected canal for its tenure to be considered a matter of indifference.  Similar ground was taken with regard to the Bay Islands, Ruatan and others, stretching along the south side of the Bay of Honduras, near the coast of the republic of that name, and so uniting, under the control of the great naval power, the Belize to the Mosquito Coast.  The United States maintained that these islands, then occupied by Great Britain, belonged in full right to Honduras.