The protests of Venezuela and her appeals for justice became insistent. She demanded an arbitration of the British claims, and her demands meeting with refusal, in 1887 she broke off diplomatic relations. Our aid was invoked by her, and Secretary Bayard tendered our good offices to promote a friendly settlement. Great Britain firmly refused to arbitrate the question except upon the basis of an antecedent concession to her of a very large part of the territory in dispute, including the mouth of the Orinoco and all territory within the extended Schomburgk Line. Meanwhile the Venezuelans grew more and more uneasy as they observed the behavior of British war-ships in and near the mouth of the Orinoco, and the acts of British subjects asserting and exercising rights of occupation and settlement upon territory they held, and rightly held, to be their own.
This was the situation when Secretary of State Richard Olney addressed to Ambassador Bayard in London, on July 20, 1895, that letter of instructions which the British ambassador at Washington described as a “fiery note.” Another British authority called it “Olney’s hectoring note.” Lord Salisbury, very much at his ease, and taking his time about it, replied to this note on November 26. He explained that “it could not be answered until it had been carefully considered by the law officers of the Crown.” It may be recalled that Earl Russell, before making reply to the vigorous protest of our minister, Mr. Charles Francis Adams, against the fitting out of the _Alabama_ in a British shipyard, referred the matter to the “law officers of the Crown.” One of these learned gentlemen having unfortunately lost his mind, there was a delay of some days, of which the _Alabama_ took advantage to escape the jurisdiction by putting out to sea. As the decision of the law officers, when tardily rendered, was that the ship must be seized, it would appear that England should lay the responsibility for the _Alabama_ award of $15,500,000 that she paid to us upon the too deliberate working of her legal machinery.
Secretary Olney in his letter, which of course Mr. Bayard was instructed to lay before Lord Salisbury, had embodied all the substantive declarations of the Monroe Doctrine, and in the very words of Mr. Monroe’s message of 1823. The first fruit of the doctrine, he pointed out, was the independence of South America, for it was to the European Powers banded together in the Holy Alliance, and then preparing to assist Spain in the recapture of her revolted colonies, that Monroe addressed his warning message. Every administration since Monroe’s had given its sanction and indorsement to the doctrine. It had been successfully invoked to put an end to the empire forced upon the Mexican people by Napoleon III, and now it was upon no general justification of interposing in a controversy between two other nations, but specifically upon the Monroe Doctrine, that we based our remonstrance against Great Britain’s high-handed ways with Venezuela.