NEWS OF THE WEEK.
THE great anxiety of the week has been the attitude of the British Government in relation to the American demands upon as. The British Press has been nearly unanimous in maintaining that we cannot for a moment consent to submit to arbitration at all those indirect claims which our statesmen supposed to be waived by the Treaty, and it seems to be fully under- -stood that the Government concur in this view. It is to be hoped that the American Government will permit the arbitration to go on upon the smaller issues which alone, as our diplomatists and -statesmen supposed, were ever referred to arbitration ; but if that is not so, the only course for Great Britain to pursue will be that which the United States pursued under the Convention of 1827, in relation to the old Boundary Treaty—a convention which 'referred the differences between the two Governments to arbitra- tion, the King of the Netherlands being subsequently chosen arbitrator. The Convention provided (as a letter to yesterday's Times reminded us) by its seventh article that "the decision of the arbitrator when given shall be taken as final and conclu- sive." But when on the 10th January, 1831, the King of the Netherlands made his award, the United States rejected that award. Of course that was a much stronger course than it would be for us now, on the strength of a fundamental difference as to the meaning of the Washington Treaty,—a difference which we can prove has not arisen from any change of view on the part of -our own statesmen—to decline an arbitration to which we never 11%i-ended to submit. But that course, though the best, if the Unite& States persist in the position they have taken up, can hardly result io any feeling between the two nations likely to be a subject for congratulation. The great stroke has, it must be admitted, failed. Want of explicitness has been its ruin.
