as being Russian waters, if the British Government regarded them as British waters; that the Government of British Columbia, the Canadian Department of the Interior, Department of Railroads and Geological Survey, should all be mistaken regarding the construction which the British Government put upon this Treaty. It would be a still stranger thing if Mr. Pelly, Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, who was Mr. Canning's adviser throughout the negotiations of the Treaty, and Sir George Simpson, who was the Resident Governor in America, both at the time the Treaty was made and at the time the Hudson's Bay Company leased the property from the Russian-American Company, were ignorant of the construction put upon the Treaty by the British Government, and, being in charge of the great interests directly affected by that construction, continued the rest of their lives in that ignorance. || It is impossible to resist the conclusion that the construction of the Treaty now contended for by Great Britain is an after-thought, never entertained by any officer of the British Government during the lifetime of the makers of the Treaty, and originated at least sixty years after the Treaty was signed. || The principal feature of Russia's occupation of Alaska was that in 1839 the Russian-American Company, with the express assent of the Russian Government, leased to the Hudson's Bay Company the mainland coast from Cape Spencer to the Portland Canal, and that this lease was renewed from time to time until the American purchase. The terms of the lease were apt to describe the entire coast, and the maps showing the leased territory, which were furnished to the British Government by Sir J. H. Pelly in 1849 and Sir George Simpson. in 1857, showed that territory to include the heads of the bays and inlets and all the land surrounding them. It is conceded that the British Government knew of the lease, for it was given in settlement of a claim which the British Government was pressing against the Russian Government, the subject of a diplomatic controversy regarding the construction of the Treaty of 1825. The knowledge of the territory leased is brought home to the British Government by the last-mentioned maps. If the Government of Great Britain considered that the true construction of the Treaty gave to that Government, and therefore to the Hudson's Bay Company, the heads of the inlets and the territory surrounding them, it is quite impossible that, without a word upon that subject, the Hudson's Bay Company should have recognized Russia's title to that very territory by becoming a tenant. | Upon the purchase of Alaska by the United States in 1867, the officers of the United States took formal possession, with appropriate ceremonies, of the territory at the head of

the Lynn Canal, and the officers of the Hudson's Bay Company surrendered the possession which they had theretofore held as tenants of Russia, and departed, leaving the head of the Lynn Canal in the possession of the United States. From that time until the present the United States has retained that possession, and has performed the duties and exercised the powers of sovereignty there. For certainly more than twenty years after that, there was not a suggestion from the British Government that the possession was not rightful. In the meantime, the Naval and Military officers of the United States governed the Indians who lived at the heads of the inlets; those Indians were included in the United States' Census; order was enforced among them, and their misdeeds were punished by the United States; a public school and mission schools were established at the head of the Lynn Canal, under the auspices of the United States' Government; the land laws of the United States were extended over the territory, and mineral claims were located in the territory now in question; the revenue laws of the United States were extended over the territory, and were enforced in the territory in question; foreign vessels were forbidden to unload at Chilkat, and obeyed this prohibition; a post-office was established at the head of the Lynn Canal; an astronomical station of the United States' Coast Survey was established there; factories for the canning of salmon were erected and operated by American citizens; and all these operations of Government were unaccompanied by any suggestion that the United States was not rightfully there. In the meantime, Great Britain refrained from exercising, or attempting to exercise, any of the functions of Government in the neighbourhood of these inlets. The true condition was stated by the Prime Minister of Canada, in the Canadian Parliament, on the 16th February, 1898, when he said:

„My honourable friend is aware that, although this is disputed territory, it has been in the possession of the United States ever since they acquired this country from the Russian Government in 1867, and, so far as my information goes, I am not aware that any protest has ever been raised by any Government against the occupation of Dyea and Skaguay by the United States;" || and when, on the 7th March, 1898, he said: ,,The fact remains that, from time immemorial, Dyea was in possession of the Russians, and in 1867 it passed into the hands of the Americans, and it has been held in their hands ever since. Now, I will not recriminate here; this is not the time nor the occasion for doing so, but, so far as I am aware, no protest has ever been entered against the occupation of Dyea by the American authorities, and when the American

authorities are in possession of that strip of territority on the sea which has Dyea as its harbour, succeeding the possession of the Russians from time immemorial, it becomes manifest to everybody that at this moment we cannot dispute their possession, and that, before their possession can be disputed, the question must be determined by a settlement of the question involved in the Treaty." It is manifest that the attempt to dispute that possession to which the Prime Minister refers is met by the practical, effective construction of the Treaty presented by the longcontinued acquiescence of Great Britain in the construction which gave the territory to Russia and the United States, and to which the Prime Minister testifies. Only the clearest case of mistake could warrant a change of construction, after so long a period of acquiescence in the former construction, and no such case has been made out before this Tribunal.

Aus dem Bericht der kgl. Untersuchungskommission über den Südafrikanischen Krieg.")

Nr. 13233. GROSSBRITANNIEN.

Bericht.

Section I.

9. Juli 1903.

The Military Preparations for the War in South Africa.

8. The Commission are, in the first place, directed to inquire into the Military Preparations for the War in South Africa". This must be understood as a direction to inquire (a) what military preparations were in fact made; (b) to what extent they were, or were not, made in sufficient time, and were equal to overcoming the opposition which, upon the information which it was then possible to obtain, might reasonably be anticipated. If they were not sufficiently timely and otherwise adequate, it must be further asked who were the authorities responsible, and what defence have they to offer? || 9. A distinction must be made between the preparedness of this country for any war in the year 1899, and the definite preparation made for the event of a war against one or both of the Dutch Republics in South Africa. Into the former question the Commission are not expressly directed to inquire. At the same time the second direction to the Commission, i. e., to inquire into the supply of men, ammunition, equipment, and transport by „sea and land," indirectly raises the question of preparedness for any considerable war in 1899. The whole military system as it stood at that date was tested by the war in South Africa.

Public Negotiations and Transactions Previously to the War.

10. In considering the question of the preparations made for the war in South Africa it seems to be convenient in the first place to review

*) Blaubuch Cd. 1789. 1903. Red.

concisely the negotiations and transactions which ended in the outbreak of war in the autumm of 1899, as shown in published despatches. I 11. In order to trace this history fully it would be necessary to begin at the date when, in 1881, after the previous Boer War, a qualified independence was granted by Her late Majesty's Government to the inhabitants of the Transvaal territories, and was reluctantly accepted by a dissatisfied Volksraad, who desired a complete independence. It would also be necessary to refer to the modifications made in the „Pretoria. Convention" by the London Convention of 1884, to the expedition which had to be sent in 1885 under Sir Charles Warren to restrict the South African Republic to the frontiers fixed on the west by the Conventions, and to other matters. From a military point of view the situation in South Africa did not become serious until the results of the discovery of the Witwatersrand gold reefs in 1886 began to operate. This discovery led to the foundation of Johannesburg, the extraordinary increase of British population in the Transvaal, the alteration of the franchise laws in the year 1890 with the result of the practical exclusion of that population from a share in political power, and the emergence of numerous questions in which the views and interests of the British population came into collision with those of the Government of the Republic. In the year 1894 the British Government intervened, through Sir Henry Loch, then High Commissioner, on behalf of the British inhabitants, in connection with the claim of the Transvaal Government to commandeer them for service in local native wars. The claim was withdrawn, though not before the possibility of a resort to force had been intimated. || 12. It does not appear to be necessary that the Commission should enter into the details of this previous period, but the year 1895 seems to be a point at which a closer investigation of public events may begin. In that year numerous grievances of the Uitlander population, including interference by the Volksraad with the courts of law in favour of the Government, had been fully developed; it was known that the Transvaal Government had begun to make armaments on a larger scale than before; there were apprehensions, due to speeches of President Kruger, that he was endeavouring to form special relations with foreign powers. In this country a new Government came into power in the summer of 1895, and the Ministers who where responsible for the administration of Colonial and Military affairs down to the time of the war assumed their respective offices. In the same year Field-Marshal Viscount Wolseley was appointed to be Commander-in-Chief for a term of five years, and the departments of the War Office were re-organised under the Order