The Secretary of State to the Mexican Ambassador.
Washington, June 17, 1910.
Excellency: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of the memoranda of your embassy, dated May 18 and June 91 last, and of your note No. 366 of June 9, inclosed with your embassy’s memorandum of the same date.
This Government learns with great satisfaction that your excellency’s Government accepts arbitration in the form proposed in this department’s note No. 208, of March 22 last, as well as the terms suggested for the maintenance of the status quo in the Chamizal tract pending the arbitration. Your excellency adds the proviso that “the decisions of the commissioner to be designated by the Department of State shall have but a provisional character and shall not impair the rights that the interested parties may have on the land.” By this the department understands your excellency to mean that the decision of the commissioners designated by this department shall have force and effect only pending the arbitration and shall have no effect whatever as regards the ultimate title to the lands in question after the decision of the international commission. This was the meaning intended to be conveyed by the department’s note of March 22, and this Government therefore accepts in this sense the proviso suggested by your excellency. This Government will take pleasure in instructing the commissioner, who will be designated at once, seasonably to communicate a copy of his decisions to the Mexican delegate on the International Boundary Commission.
Referring to our conversation and to my promise to hand you a draft for a convention which may serve as a basis for the proposed convention for the submission to arbitration of the Chamizal case, I beg leave to inclose herewith such a draft2 which I have endeavored to draw in such a manner as to depart as little as possible from the provisions of the convention of 1889 providing for the International Boundary Commission. It is hoped that the provisions of this draft will be readily understood and will be acceptable to your excellency’s Government, and the department will be happy to discuss them with the embassy at any time. In view of the early adjournment of the Senate of the United States, to which it will be necessary, in accordance with the constitutional requirement, for the Executive to submit this convention for its advice and consent, I beg to suggest that your excellency call upon me at your convenience in order that we may communicate to each other the respective lists of three Canadian jurists, as provided in department’s note of March 22, 1910, which provision the department understands to have been assented to by your Government. The department believes that it will be found that we shall have no difficulty in agreeing upon an umpire in the course of an informal conversation.
The department most cordially reciprocates your felicitations upon this further evidence of the neighborly good understanding between our two Governments, which has once more enabled us to solve our differences in a manner which is not only satisfactory as [Page 722] regards the immediate matter in controversy, but also adds another landmark in the history of arbitration in which the two Republics have borne so distinguished a part.
Accept, etc.,
- Not printed.↩
- Not printed. Treaty as proclaimed will be printed in Foreign Relations, 1911.↩