50 G. L. Burr months from the exchange of the ratifications. But the ratifications were not finally exchanged until mid-June ; and, though a whole half-year more had gone before Great Britain announced as her counsel Sir Richard Webster, Mr. Asquith, and Mr. Rowlatt, and before Venezuela retained Mr. Mallet-Prevost, General Harrison, and General Tracy, and yet many months more ere there was added to the British side Sir Robert Reid and to the Venezuelan Mr. James Russell Soley, scholars were from the first at work under the direction of the two governments. Nor were the counsel strangers to the question at issue. Sir Richard, at least, as Attorney-General of Great Britain, must long have known it well ; and of yet longer standing or deeper study were Mr. Harrison's relations with it as President of the United States, Mr. Tracy's as a member of his Cabinet, and Mr. Mallet-Prevost's as the Secretary of President Cleveland's Commission. It was not strange, then, that even the Case of each country, submitted in mid-March of 1898, was able to include in the huge mass of appended evidence a considerable number of fresh docu- ments. Much bulkier and more important was the new evidence published by the Counter-Case which each filed with the other five months later, on the i 5th of August. And not less interesting than these new documents were the fresh maps embodied in the hand- some atlases with which each state accompanied both Case and Counter-Case. So ended the gathering of evidence. The printed argument next prepared by each party and submitted on December 15 could only interpret and discuss, not enlarge, the testimony already presented. The same restriction governed, of course, the oral argument, which in almost interminable detail dragged on at Paris before the arbiters from June to October of 1899; yet, even at this late stage, by joint consent, more than one item of new testi- mony was laid before the judges. Multiple and various were the fresh sources of this fresh evi- dence. Most fruitful to the British side were perhaps the Hydro- graphic Depository at Madrid, the colonial archives of British Guiana (where less than had been supposed proved to have fallen a prey to tropical destroyers), and the records of the old VValcheren town of Veere. To the Venezuelans the archives of the old Spanish- American realms, reinforced afresh by those of Spain and of the Capuchin order at Rome, yielded most of value. But alas for any who shall seek to study these new documents by themselves ! Scattered in their chronological order through the vastly greater mass of reprinted ones, they are, save to the most wearisome search, as effectively lost in the thousand pages of Vene-
