until 1857 that England and the United States submitted the loss of this vessel to the arbitration of Louis Napoleon, and it was not until 1882 that Congress directed the Secretary of State to adjust the claims of the captain, owners, officers, and crew of the brig. Long before this, Mr. Reid had assigned his claim to his son, Samuel C. Reid, Jr. The Court of Claims fixed the value of the vessel at $70,739, and put the owners' share at $43,000. For want of evi dence to adjudicate the relative interests of the heirs of the fifteen owners, Secretary Frelinghuysen decided that their estates should share alike. Mr. Reid got his half of the whole at once, — $21,500. He also got something for his services from the share of the officers and crew, so that one would think he might have been satisfied. The owners' shares were not all paid out, however, as some of them had died without heirs. This part of the award, of course, reverted to the United States; and it is for all, or at least the major part, of this that Mr. Reid continues his suit. The McGarrahan claim is another inter esting case, but one which is so perennially before the public that it seems useless to give more than a brief outline of what the claimant really wants. His claim is for title to land for which nobody disputes, I believe, that he has paid good money. At the time of the purchase, however, the title was not good. Since then it has become vested in the United States, and the present question is, Shall the man who actually bought and paid for the property in good faith receive the final title, or shall it go to a mining com pany who are simply squatters? To show how investigators may be taken in, I will give a brief resume of the Weil and La Abra bills, as they are called. The his tory of these cases runs back to 1868, when by a treaty with Mexico the United States secured something like four million dollars' worth of awards. The La Abra SilverMining Company was awarded $683,041 for
alleged damages arising from the closing of a silver mine. In the Weil case the award amounted to $487,819, and was for cotton and mules said to have been seized by Mexican troops. When the United States had paid to each claimant about one-third of his award, suspicions of fraud were aroused, and further payment was sus pended. This was in 1877. After a long fight in Congress, early in 1892, the matter was finally referred to the Court of Claims. If the Court finds that the awards were pro cured by fraud and perjury, the unpaid bal ance will be returned to Mexico; otherwise, payment on the claims will be resumed. The suspicions are founded in the mine case on what seems to be conclusive evidence, that it had never been seized at all, but had been voluntarily abandoned as valueless, and that the claim had been a fabrication of the former superintendent of the mine, inspired by the appointment of the commis sion to consider claims arising out of the Mexican war. The ex-superintendent, I believe, died before any payment had been made on the award. In the La Abra case, then, there had once been a mine, though a valueless one. The Weil claim, however, had even less foundation in fact, if the latest evidence proves to be correct. The claim was based on the allegation that Weil lived in New Orleans, was engaged in running cotton through Mexico during the war, and had lost a heavy mule train and seven hundred bales of cotton through seizure by the Mex icans. Cotton was then worth fifty cents a pound. The proofs at the time seemed so complete that the award was promptly made, and question would probably never have been raised, had it not been for the mixed conditions of Weil's business affairs, which caused a quarrel over the disposition of the proceeds. It now looks as if Weil had never owned a mule or a pound of cot ton in his life. The Court of Private Land Claims was
