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The most important diplomatic act was the signature in 1850 of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty which conceded to England a joint interest in any canal that might be built through the isthmus connecting North and South America.
It was on considerations of this kind that she signed the Hay-Pauncefote treaty with the United States in 1901, and the defensive alliance with Japan in 1902. In view of the fact that the United States was bent on carrying out the long deferred canal scheme, Great Britain realized that a further insistence on her rights under the Clayton-Bulwer treaty would lead to friction and possible conflict.
Hamilton Fish directed General Schenck to remonstrate, if upon investigation he found it to be necessary, against British encroachments upon the territory of Guatemala as an infringement of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty. In spite of the doubts expressed by Mr. Seward in the dispatch to Mr.
In addition to securing from Great Britain, through the Hay-Pauncefote treaty, the abrogation of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty, thereby making it possible for the United States to construct the Isthmian Canal, Secretary Hay succeeded in settling the controversy over the Alaskan boundary, which had been a subject of dispute between the United States and Great Britain for half a century.
The first obstacle to such a project lay in the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty with Great Britain. That obstacle Blaine had attempted in vain to remove; in fact his bungling diplomacy had riveted it yet more closely by making Great Britain maintain it as a point of honor.
A railroad was completed across Panama in 1855, but no canal was constructed until years after the great transcontinental railroads had bound California to the East by bonds which required no foreign sanction. Yet the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty remained an entangling alliance, destined to give lovers of peace and amity many more uncomfortable hours.
Squier signed with Honduras a treaty which ceded Tiger Island, in the Bay of Fonseca, to the United States, thus giving us a naval station on the Pacific side of the isthmus. This treaty, like that negotiated by Mr. Hise, was unauthorized and never submitted to the Senate. Both treaties were used, however, in bringing England to the signature of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty.
A much more serious obstacle to the accomplishment of the objects of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty than the failure of the above proposal arose from the wide divergence of opinion between the British and American governments in regard to its interpretation.
Frightened by England in the main; for truly we have no other power to fear. So when the Clayton-Bulwer treaty came up I fought it as I fought Polk on the Oregon boundary of '49. I said then, and I say now, that the time may come when we shall want to possess some portion of Central America.
Between the settlement of the Alabama Claims and the controversy over the Venezuelan boundary, diplomatic intercourse between the two countries was enlivened by the efforts of Blaine and Frelinghuysen to convince the British Government that the Clayton-Bulwer treaty was out of date and therefore no longer binding, by the assertion of American ownership in the seal herds of Bering Sea and the attempt to prevent Canadians from taking these animals in the open sea, and by the summary dismissal of Lord Sackville-West, the third British minister to receive his passports from the United States without request.
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