Webster, achieved an eminence of his own; and William Pinkney, of Maryland, who, besides winning distinction in diplomacy and statesmanship, was the acknowledged leader of the American bar of his time. The British commissioners were Sir John Nicholl, an eminent civilian, who was afterwards succeeded by Maurice Swabey; and John Anstey. The fifth commissioner was Colonel John Trumbull, of Connecticut, who had accompanied Jay to England when he negotiated the treaty. The mode by which Trumbull was chosen is worthy of mention. The treaty provided that in case the four commissioners, two of whom were to be appointed by each government, could not agree upon the fifth, he should be chosen by lot. In execution of this stipulation, the commissioners on each side presented to the others a list of four persons; but, as neither side would yield, it became necessary to resort to the casting of lots. The next step, according to common practice, would have been for each side to place in the urn a name of its own independent selection, with the chances in favor of his being a partisan. But at London each side selected its name from the list of four made out by the other with a view to a mutual agreement, and the result was that a well-disposed man became the fifth commissioner.

The board had not been long in session when a serious controversy arose as to its power to deter

mine its own jurisdiction in respect of the several claims presented for its decision. The division of opinion was so pronounced that for a time the British commissioners absented themselves from the meetings, but the difficulty was eventually submitted to Lord Chancellor Loughborough, who ended it by declaring "that the doubt respecting the authority of the commissioners to settle their own jurisdiction was absurd, and that they must necessarily decide upon cases being within or without their competency."

Important questions of law came before the commissioners in relation to contraband, the rights of neutrals, and the finality of the decisions of prize courts. These were all discussed with marked ability, especially by Pinkney. His opinions as a member of the board Wheaton justly pronounced to be "finished models of judicial eloquence, uniting powerful and comprehensive argument with a copious, pure, and energetic diction"; and they are almost all we possess in a complete and authentic form of the legal reasoning of the great master by whom they were delivered. The sessions of the board were brought to a close on February 24, 1804, all the business before it having been finished. There was, however, an interruption in its proceedings from July 30, 1799, to February 15, 1802, pending the diplomatic adjustment of the difficulty caused by the breaking up of the commission at Philadelphia.

By reason of the fact that the proceedings of the London commission for a century remained unpublished, its labors have not received from writers the attention which they deserve. It was estimated that, through the operation of the stipulations under which the commissioners sat, American claimants recovered from the British government the enormous sum of $11,650,000. "The whole of this sum," says Trumbull, "was promptly and punctually paid to each claimant, or his assignee; for, after a careful and accurate examination of the merits of every case of complaint, the awards of the board were made in favor of each individual, in the form of an order to pay, and payable at the treasury of Great Britain; nor do I recollect even to have heard a single complaint, of the delay of an hour, in any instance of an award presented for payment." The aggregate of the awards against the United States appears to have been $143,428.14; but although this amount was relatively small, its payment established the principle that a government is liable in damages for neglect to perform its neutral duties, and thus laid the foundation of the award made in 1872 at Geneva.

Since the close of the arbitral proceedings under the Jay treaty, arbitration has, except in the case of the extraordinary train of events that led up to the war of 1812, been almost habitually employed by the United States and Great Britain for the set

tlement of controversies that could not be adjusted by negotiation. Like the Jay treaty, the treaty of Ghent, of December 24, 1814, which restored peace between the two countries, provided for three arbitrations. The first related to the ownership of certain islands in Passamaquoddy Bay and the Bay of Fundy; the second, to the ascertainment of the boundary of the United States from the source of the river St. Croix to the river St. Lawrence; the third, to the determination of the boundary along the middle of the Great Lakes and of their water communications to the most northwestern point of the Lake of the Woods. In 1818, a difference as to the performance by Great Britain of her obligation under the treaty of Ghent, not to carry away from United States territory then in her possession "any slaves or other private property," was referred to the Emperor of Russia. He rendered a decision in favor of the United States, and in 1822 a mixed commission was erected in order to fix the amount to be paid. In 1827 a dispute as to the northeastern boundary was referred to the King of the Netherlands; but as his award was recommendatory rather than decisive, both governments agreed to waive it, and the question was settled by the Webster-Ashburton treaty. In 1853 a convention was entered into for the settlement by means of a mixed commission of all outstanding claims. The commission sat in London, and disposed of many important

controversies, including the celebrated case of the Creole, which so nearly caused a rupture of relations in 1842. For the peculiarly satisfactory results of the board's labors, credit was perhaps chiefly due to the umpire, Joshua Bates, an American by birth, but then the head of the house of the Barings, who exhibited in his decisions the same broad intelligence and sound judgment as had characterized his exceptionally successful career in business. By the reciprocity treaty of 1854, by which the troubles as to the northeastern fisheries were temporarily allayed, arbitration was employed for the purpose of determining what fisheries were exclusively reserved to the inhabitants of the two countries under the agreement. In 1863 another arbitral board was erected for the purpose of deciding upon the claims of the Hudson's Bay Company and the Puget's Sound Agricultural Company against the United States for damages to their property and rights in connection with the treaty of 1846, by which the limits between the United States and the British possessions west of the Rocky Mountains were established.

This board was still in session when the relations between the United States and Great Britain were seriously disturbed by the controversies growing out of the civil war, the northeastern fisheries, and the disputed San Juan water boundary. These differ ences were all composed by the great treaty signed