public opinion on so important a matter, never can be
amiss.

This question, from an abstract, speculative phase of the Monroe
Doctrine, took on the concrete and somewhat urgent form of security
for our trans-Isthmian routes against foreign interference towards the
middle of this century, when the attempt to settle it was made by the
oft-mentioned Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, signed April 19, 1850. Great
Britain was found then to be in possession, actual or constructive, of
certain continental positions, and of some outlying islands, which
would contribute not only to military control, but to that kind of
political interference which experience 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 w