ative and executive branches of this
Government and determine that there was no justice in the original
claim. A commissioner of Paraguay might have been a proper 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