d States. We supposed we had
accomplished that object by the convention of April 19, 1850, which
would never have been signed nor ratified on the part of the United
States but for the conviction that in virtue of its provisions neither
Great Britain nor the United States was thereafter to exercise any
territorial sovereignty in fact or in name in any part of Central
America, however or whensoever acquired, either before or afterwards.
The essential object of the convention--the neutralization of the
Isthmus--would, of course, become a nullity if either Great Britain
or the United States were to continue to hold exclusively islands or
mainland of the Isthmus, and more especially if, under any claim of
protectorship of Indians, either Government were to remain forever
sovereign in fact of the Atlantic shores of the three States of Costa
Rica, Nicaragua, and Honduras.

I have already communicated to the two Houses of Congress full
information of the protracted and hitherto fruitless efforts which the
United States have made to arrange this international question with
Great Britain. It is referred to on the present occasion only because of
its intimate connection with the special object now to be brought to the
attention of Congress.

The unsettled political condition of some of the Spanish American
Republics has never ceased to be regarded by this Government with
solicitude and regret on their own account, while it has been the source
of continual embarrassment in our public and private relations with
them. In the midst of the violent revolutions and the wars by which they
are continually agitated, their public authorities are unable to afford
due protection to foreigners and to foreign interests within their
territory, or even to defend their own soil against individual
aggressors, foreign or domestic, the burden of the inconveniences and
losses of which therefore devolves in no inconsiderable degree upon the
foreign states associated with them in close relations of geographical
vicinity or of commercial intercourse.

Such is more emphatically the situation of the United States
with respect to the Republics of Mexico and of Central America.
Notwithstanding, however, the relative remoteness of the European
States from America, facts of the same order have not failed to appear
conspicuously in their intercourse with Spanish American Republics.
Great Britain has repeatedly been constrained to recur to measures of
force f