Robert C. Schenck to Granville Leveson-Gower, May 10, 1872

General Schenck to Earl Granville.

My Lord: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt, at 4 o’clock p.m. to-day, of your note of this date, in which you take occasion to recapitulate some recent communications we have had with each other on the subject of the Arbitration on the Alabama claims, and to state briefly, according to your understanding and note of the transactions, what occurred subsequently in consequence of those communications. You refer to and furnish me at the same time with copies of a draught of a proposed note delivered to me on the 6th instant, and your memorandum of a conversation I had with you afterward, at an interview on the 8th instant, in which it was suggested to you to, propose an Article in addition to, or in amendment of, the Treaty of the 8th of May, 1871.

This suggestion of a Treaty stipulation, you will remember, was made in consequence of the failure to obtain from you any draught of a note which, in the opinion of the Government of the United States, was in conformity with the proposal which Mr. Fish telegraphed to me on the 27th of April, as I informed you he was led to expect would be made.

Your Lordship proceeds’ to say that the Treaty is, in the judgment of Her Majesty’s Government, clear and sufficient, and excludes from the Arbitration the claims for indirect losses advanced by the Government of the United States, and that it is therefore difficult for Her Majesty’s Government to take the initiative in the manner the United States have proposed; that Her Majesty’s Government think it belongs to the Government of the United States, to whose friendly suggestion the communications which have taken place since the date of Mr. Fish’s reply to your letter of the 20th of March have been due, to frame the suggested article; but yet, in order to meet their wishes and to save any inconvenient delay, you will transmit to me a draught of an Article, which, if the Government of the United States think fit to adopt, will be accepted by Her Majesty’s Government.

And I have also to acknowledge the receipt of another note of this date from your Lordship, which was delivered to me at the same time, inclosing the draught of an Article in the preceding one referred to.

I will hasten to communicate immediately by telegraph this draught to my Government; and I doubt not it will be considered at once, and the result of that consideration communicated to me through the same medium, and with as little delay as possible, and in the same friendly spirit in which your proposal is offered.

I have the honor to be, with the highest consideration, my Lord, your Lordship’s most obedient servant,