File No. 738.3915/130.]

[Untitled]

[Memorandum of the fifth meeting.]

On Saturday [July 6] at 11 o’clock the Haitian-Dominican plenipotentiaries met further to discuss their boundary question. After two hours’ discussion of quite immaterial points they were able to make no progress and adjourned, with the understanding that they should be notified on Monday by the Department the date of the next meeting.

The fundamental difference between the plenipotentiaries seems to be that the Haitian Minister strongly contends that the protocol of arbitration should specifically define the issues between the parties and desires to have determined as a previous question the validity or invalidity of the conventions of ‘95 and ‘98, whereas the Dominican Minister seems to feel that a protocol on much broader lines should be drawn, merely referring the whole question to arbitration and at the same time providing for the appointment of an international commission of topographical engineers and experts, appointed either by the Hague Court or by the parties, which shall visit the disputed zone and by means of witnesses ascertain as precisely as possible the location of the three lines of the Treaty of Aranjuez, the line of 1856, and the line of 1874, and report its findings to the court, so that should the court decide the treaties of ‘95 and ‘98 to be valid, it will immediately have the information as to where the line of ‘74 ran. If its decision should be contrary, it will have information before it as to the other two lines. The Dominican Minister contends that, whereas it will be a matter of comparative ease for impartial investigators to ascertain those lines at present, it would probably be quite out of the question for them to do so should it become locally known what line was fixed by the court.

I believe that it would be well if the Secretary would meet the plenipotentiaries on Saturday next at 11 o’clock [July 13], when they have been notified the next meeting will be held, and take up with them urgently the necessity of coming to some conclusion and the possible desirability of the Department’s endeavoring to draw a protocol that may reconcile the views of both.

Doyle.

Note.—There is no subsequent memorandum by Mr. Doyle, but see under “Political Affairs,” page 369, the last paragraph of the Department’s identic letter to the Dominican and Haitian Ministers, dated September 27, 1912; and, below, the last paragraph of the letter from Mr. Peynado, dated November 22, 1912.