USA Got More Than Their Due

Today’s installment concludes The Alaskan Boundary Settlement,
with our final installment from F. C. Wade and then we present the third part of the series with Goldwin Smith. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

If you have journeyed through all of the installments of this series, just one more to go and you will have completed eight thousand words from great works of history. Congratulations! For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in The Alaskan Boundary Settlement.

Time: 1903
Place: Border Between Alaska and Canada

The most serious blow to Canada is the part of the decision which makes the mountains run around the heads of inlets, as this makes every inlet part of the absolute territory of Russia, and shuts off Canada from approach to the ocean by inlets, arms of the sea, estuaries, and inland seas for a distance of 600 miles, thereby accomplishing, in part, the long cherished object of the United States. The only grounds on which such a decision could be based are:

1. That the words “coast of the ocean” mean and include the heads of inlets, or
2. That it was the intention of the treaty of 1825 to give Russia an unbroken and impenetrable strip of territory along the northwest coast of America.

It seems to be impossible to come to any other conclusion than that reached by the Canadian Commissioners, namely, that Canada’s interests were sacrificed and her just rights ignored by the majority of the Tribunal. “Our position during the conference of the Tribunal,” they say, “has been an unfortunate one. We have been in entire accord between ourselves, and have, severally and jointly, urged our views as strongly as we were able, but we have been compelled to witness the sacrifice of the interests of Canada, powerless to prevent it, though satisfied that the course the majority determined to pursue in respect to the matters specially referred to ignored the just rights of Canada.”

Goldwin Smith

Now we begin the third part of our series with our selection from Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 20 by Goldwin Smith,

Goldwin Smith (1823-1910) was a British historian and journalist.

The British Government, in consequence of this Alaskan decision, is once more upbraided with careless sacrifice of Canadian interests. This complaint, in which the voice of even the late Sir John Bourinot is heard, derives some color of probability on the present occasion from the assiduity with which Great Britain is just now deeming it politic to cultivate American friendship. Nevertheless it is baseless. The British Government has always done for us the best that diplomacy could do. In the Oregon dispute it went to the very verge of war. Beyond the verge it could not possibly have gone. It has pleaded our case to the utmost of its ability, and through the best advocates that it could command. But it has had no ratio ultima. Would its people have allowed it, for a belt of territory on the other side of the Atlantic which they could not point out in the map and pictured to themselves only as a snowy waste, to engage in mortal conflict with a powerful nation of their own race, defeat in which would have been not only loss and dishonor, but almost ruin? What, in a war with the United States, would become of England’s mercantile marine, of her foreign trade, of her indispensable supply of cotton? The United States are self -fed; Great Britain depends for food on supplies from abroad. Nor could her colonies feed her in time of war. They would be involved in the war and their transport would be cut off. Those who remember the case of the Ashburton treaty will bear witness that the Government of Sir Robert Peel gave the subject their most anxious attention and did for Canada all that was in their power. But Brougham spoke for the nation when he avowed that he did not care where the boundary was fixed so long as there was peace. Palmerston played his usual part, denounced the treaty as a capitulation, and tried to raise a storm. But there was no response to his appeal. The right of the British Government to cede, of course, we could not dispute. The territory of a dependency belongs to the sovereign power, which is at liberty, in disposing of it, to consult the interests of the Empire at large and particularly those of the Imperial people.

In this Alaska case the judgment was delivered by a British judge whose capacity is admitted on all hands, and whose uprightness cannot be seriously impeached.

We have a monument of the care of the British Government for us in the agreement restricting the launching of vessels of war on the lakes. An early consequence of “the cultivation of childish hostility to the Americans,” which Sir Richard Cart- wright so earnestly deprecates, would probably be the renunciation of that agreement, putting our cities and towns on the lakes and our railway communication along the shore of Lake Superior at the mercy of an American flotilla.

Nor can it be justly said of the Americans that they have shown themselves regardless of right. They may have driven hard bargains, and perhaps have got more than their due. They, not very unnaturally, regarded England as a foreign power meddling with the concerns of a continent in which the chief interest was theirs. But when they might have taken all they would by force, they have submitted to international law. Had they chosen in this Alaska case to rule in their own favor, and decline submission to arbitration, we should have had no means of enforcing their submission. Let the military qualities of our people be what they may, can we possibly hope that we should be able to hold our own against a nation which outnumbers us fourteen times, which would be rapidly equipped for war; which has shown that it can at short notice put half a million of men into the field, and has now a considerable navy? It happened that the Americans, if they had chosen to refuse arbitration and settle the question by force, might have appealed with effect to a recent precedent in point. The Transvaal Government proposed to submit to arbitration the question of sovereignty on which the alleged right of interference with the internal affairs of that Republic depended. Its prayer was refused on the singular ground that to submit to arbitration would have been to give away the whole case; as, if the arbitrators had been fair, it most unquestionably would.

This ends our selections on The Alaskan Boundary Settlement by three of the most important authorities of this topic:

• Lecture by John W. Foster
• Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 20 by F. C. Wade published in 1914.
• Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 20 by Goldwin Smith published in 1914

John W. Foster began here. F. C. Wade began here.

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