No. 707.

Mr. Bayard to Mr. Soteldo .

Sir: I duly received your note of the 29th ultimo, in relation to the payment of the claim of Mr. John E. Wheelock, and in the interview with which you honored me on the 2d instant you handed me a draft at sixty days’ sight for $3,000 which, when paid, will discharge the first moiety of the payment agreed upon in settlement of that case.

Due notice is taken of your intimation, on behalf of the Government of Venezuela, that this adjustment of the Wheelock matter is not to be deemed a precedent authority for the future disposition of this class of cases by diplomatic intervention without recourse to judicial remedies.

In thus taking cognizance of the formal expression of an understanding which was, I presume, in your mind as well as mine when we reached a practical adjustment of the Wheelock case, I am not, of course, to be understood as laying down a rule of diplomatic intercourse for mutual governance in future cases arising.

As sovereign states, both the United States and Venezuela have the undoubted right to be satisfied, each for itself, that no wrong done to its citizens by the other passes unredressed; and neither sovereign can rightly be expected to recognize validity as attaching to the municipal enactments of the one which may assume to bar the exercise of the rights given by international law to the other.

Accept, &c.,

T. F. BAYARD.