since proved one of the most important factors in the whole problem of interoceanic commerce.

Nor was the traditional rivalry of Nicaragua lacking. In March, 1849, New York capitalists organised the "Compania de Transito de Nicaragua," and made a contract with the Nicaraguan Government for the construction of a canal; and later in the same year Cornelius Vanderbilt and others organised the American Atlantic and Pacific Ship Canal Company, absorbed into it the "Compania de Transito de Nicaragua," and in 1851, under the name of the Accessory Transit Company, established a transit route across Nicaragua, with steamboats on the river and lakes and coach and truck lines for the remainder of the way. This was for years a much frequented route of interoceanic travel, but in time was overcome and destroyed by the superior facilities of the Panama Railroad route.

Diplomacy next began to dominate the scene, and not to the advantage or the credit of America. The British seizure of the Mosquito Coast and the San Juan River, and the British designs upon the Bay of Fonseca, were so great a menace to existing American interests at Nicaragua and to all prospect of extending them that much commercial and popular indignation was excited in the United States. In response to this President Polk and his Secretary of State, James Buchanan, sent Elijah Hise in 1849 as a special envoy to Nicaragua to see what was being done and what needed to be done. Conceiving it to be his duty to uphold the principles of the Monroe Doctrine, and regarding the treaty concluded with New Granada three years before as a precedent which it would be proper to follow, Mr. Hise soon concluded a treaty with Nicaragua, giving the United States or its citi zens the exclusive right to construct a transit way, railroad or canal, across the Isthmus of Nicaragua, and to control it and guard it with fortifications; and in return giving to Nicaragua an American guarantee of the inviolability of her territorial sovereignty.

It was substantially an application to Nicaragua of the

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principles which had just been applied to Panama. But there was this radical difference between the two cases: Great Britain was not directly interested in Panama, while she was very directly interested in Nicaragua. In almost every clause Mr. Hise's treaty ignored, traversed, or defied the pretensions and ambitions of Great Britain in that region. So the Washington Government, which had no stomach for a direct conflict with a great power, flatly repudiated him and all his doings, on the ground that he had exceeded his instructions; which was true enough, seeing that he had been sent down there practically without any instructions at all. In his place, President Taylor and his Secretary of State, John M. Clayton,-who had succeeded Polk and Buchanan while Hise was in Nicaragua, sent E. G. Squier to the Isthmus, with instructions to negotiate with Nicaragua for an "equal right of transit for all nations through a canal which should be hampered by no restrictions." In addition he was bidden to be careful "not to involve this country in any entangling alliances, or any unnecessary controversy."

Mr. Squier went to work with zeal and with discretion, and in September, 1849, secured from Nicaragua a favourable concession for a canal, in behalf of the Company already mentioned, which had been organised that year by Cornelius Vanderbilt. But he also, moved by much the same spirit that had animated Mr. Hise, made a treaty with Nicaragua, guaranteeing the neutrality of the canal and the sovereignty of Nicaragua over the territory traversed by the canal and over the ports at its terminals. This, again, was practically a challenge to Great Britain, since she was already asserting her sovereignty, or at least her control, over much of the line of the canal, and over its Caribbean terminus. The British answer came promptly. Honduras, the owner of Tigre Island in the Bay of Fonseca, was pressed for immediate payment of an old British claim, the obvious intent of Great Britain being to seize the Island in default of settlement. To prevent this, Mr. Squier hastened to make a treaty with Honduras, under which Tigre Island and certain lands on

settlement in Honduras "or its dependencies," to wit, the Bay Islands and the Mosquito coast. In other words, Great Britain was to be confirmed in all her disputed claims in Central America, and was thus to be enabled to do to a great extent the very things the treaty forbade the United States to do.

In this Mr. Clayton practically acquiesced, and so the treaty, which was signed on April 18, 1850, was ratified on July 5, 1850. The treaties negotiated by Messrs. Hise and Squier were cancelled, and the Clayton-Bulwer treaty became the supreme law of the land.

Meantime various schemes of canal construction arose, only to be defeated by the circumstances established by this very treaty whose ostensible object was to promote the enterprise. The Republic of Costa Rica had Andreas Oersted, a Danish engineer, in 1847, survey a Nicaragua canal route which instead of running to the Bay of Fonseca should reach the Pacific through Costa Rican territory. Stephen Bailey proposed another route in the same general region. Immediately after the ratification of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty, Colonel O. W. Childs, a distinguished American canal engineer, was sent to Nicaragua, where he laid out an entirely new route, having its Pacific terminus at Brito. His plans were approved by the War Department at Washington, and also by British official engineers, and formed the basis of the actual attempt which was made in after years to construct a canal in Nicaragua. But all these enterprises were hampered and frustrated by political considerations. Friction and disputes arose between the United States and Great Britain over the interpretation and application of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty. Great Britain intrigued with Costa Rica and opened the way for a boundary dispute between that country and Nicaragua. Presently, the republics of Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras united in a federal league, while Guatemala and Costa Rica remained aloof, the latter almost openly hostile to the combination.

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President Pierce and his Secretary of State, William L. Marcy, took up the controversy with Great Britain, sending Solon Borland as a special agent to Central America and James Buchanan as Minister to England, with instructions to insist upon such construction of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty as would require Great Britain to withdraw from the Mosquito Coast. This demand Lord Clarendon, the British Foreign Minister, met with a flat refusal, to which he added that the British Government would not recognise the Monroe Doctrine as international law, and would not consent to be questioned further by the United States concerning her original rights in Central America. The American answer to this should have been immediate notice of abrogation of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty. Instead, our Government contented itself with bombarding, in the interest of Cornelius Vanderbilt's company, the British-Mosquito settlement of Greytown, at the mouth of the San Juan River.

Then Walker, the filibuster, began in 1855 his nefarious operations in Nicaragua, and affairs in all that part of America became chaotic. In Honduras some further work was done toward establishing satisfactory interoceanic transit. A British concern known as the Honduras Interoceanic Railway Company was organised in 1854, and secured a concession for its route across that country. Diplomatic complications ensued, however, among Honduras, Great Britain, and the United States, with the result that by 1857 all plans and operations were practically shelved. There followed some futile diplomatic passages between Great Britain and the United States, in which abrogation of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty was threatened by this country, but was not effected; and then Great Britain made a highly profitable series of treaties with various Central American. States, taking advantage of the facts that Walker's filibustering had aroused much prejudice against the United States in those countries, and that the United States was, moreover, too much concerned with its own domestic troubles

and impending civil war to pay much attention to its southern neighbours.

The climax of these diplomatic achievements of Great Britain was the negotiation, in 1860, of a treaty with Nicaragua, in which Great Britain, with an appearance of much magnanimity, agreed to abandon her protectorate over the Mosquito Coast, and to hand the whole of that region back to Nicaragua, in return for which Nicaragua was to acknowledge the validity of the claims which were thus relinquished. In fact the British withdrawal was only nominal, and the sovereignty restored to Nicaragua was the merest shadow, for it was stipulated that if Nicaragua attempted to make her sovereignty fully effective Great Britain should have the right to intervene under a title whose validity and sufficiency Nicaragua had now herself admitted.