No. 10.
My Lords: There seems to have got abroad an opinion that Her Majesty’s Commissioners at Washington, last year, relied on what has been described as a secret understanding subsisting between them and the American Commissioners, that these indirect claims would not be brought forward. I should entirely agree with an opinion which I believe was expressed a day or two ago by a noble and learned lord, who generally sits behind me, (Lord Westbury,) that if Her Majesty’s Commissioners had been induced, by any such understanding, to employ language which, in their judgment, admitted these claims, they would be liable to just and severe blame. But I distinctly deny, on the part of those who were engaged in these negotiations that that was the case. We may have failed or we may have succeeded in employing language which excludes these claims. I will not detain your lordships now by entering into any elaborate argument on that subject, so fully stated in the correspondence on the table; but, whether we failed or whether we succeeded, we were not induced to employ language which we considered would admit those claims by any consideration of that kind, and which, in this correspondence, is described as a waiver. On the 8th of March, as referred to in the Proctocol, these claims were mentioned by the United States Commissioners—mentioned in a manner which, in sub-stance, is described in that Proctocol on your lordships’ table; and throughout the course of the subsequent negotiations these claims were not again brought forward.