ntained the usual range of items
upon government and foreign relations, and devoted several pages to a
resume of the financial operations of the Treasury and the currency
problem. It closed with an appeal to the enthusiastic multitude that
approved free coinage to reexamine their views "in the light of
patriotic reason and familiar experience." It gave no hint that any
other topic was likely to pass free silver in the public view. Fifteen
days later, on December 17, 1895, the President sent a special Message
to Congress, in reference to an old dispute between Great Britain and
Venezuela, that startled the world, upset the stock markets, and brought
to life once more the Monroe Doctrine.

For many years the unsettled boundary between Venezuela and British
Guiana had been a source of irritation. The pretensions of both
claimants were great and vague, while the continuous encroachment of
British miners alarmed the weaker country. For nearly twenty years
Venezuela had vainly appealed to the United States, asking that the
dispute be arbitrated. The United States had taken a mild interest in
the wrangle, but no one before Cleveland had felt vitally concerned. He
undertook, in the summer of 1895, to persuade Great Britain to accept an
arbitration, and pressed Lord Salisbury in a series of notes drafted by
Richard Olney, Secretary of State.

The contention of Olney was that the dispute was suitable for
arbitration because of the difference in physical strength between the
two countries, and that the United States had an interest in an
equitable territorial adjustment. He stated the doctrine that John
Quincy Adams had advanced in the Administration of Monroe, that
interference with the destiny of the South American Republics affects
the United States, and asserted that this was now a part of the public
law of the United States. He listed the precedents in which it had been
advanced since 1823, finding none in which it had been flatly checked.
His long arguments upon the interests and proper supremacy of the United
States in all American questions failed to convince the British Foreign
Office, which denied both Olney's correctness in applying the Monroe
Doctrine and the binding force of the doctrine itself. Arbitration was
declined, and Cleveland, in submitting the correspondence to Congress,
urged that an American court be created to ascertain the true boundary
and that the United States afterward maintain it. "In making these