Berens to Newcastle

I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of Mr
Under Secretary Merivale's letter of the 14th ulto:
conveying a Copy of a despatch from the Governor of
British Columbia on the subject of the claims of this Company to land in that Colony and detailing your Lordship's
views as to the rights of this Company in respect of that Land.

I am quite willing to admit that, limiting your
Lordship's suggestions to the land acquired for comparatively
temporary purposes subsequent to the Treaty of Oregon
and which was more particularly referred to in my letter
to Sir Edwould Bulwer Lytton of the 12th October 1858,
this Company would be prepared to assent to your Grace's
views in respect of those rights; but I beg leave
respectfully to suggest that they have no application
to those lands in the District in question which were possessed
by this Company prior to the Treaty of Oregon and their
rights in regard to which were in all respects precisely
similar to those lands the rights in which were reserved to
them by the 3rd Article of the Oregon Treaty.

I take leave on this subject to call your Lordship's
attention to a communication received by this Company from
the Foreign Office under date the 24th June 1854

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transmitting to this Company a Report made by the Law Officers
of the Crown to the Earl of Clarendon the then Foreign
Secretary which goes at great length and with great care into
the nature of rights of this character, and I am persuaded
that I need not anticipate from Her Majesty's Government a
less favorable consideration of the rights this Company have
acquired in that part of British Columbia which was ceded to
Her Majesty's Government than was secured to them through
the intervention of Her Majesty's Government, in those portions
of the Territories in question which were held to belong to
the United States; and I have therefore no difficulty in
saying that this Company will be satisfied that their rights
in the lands claimed by them under titles acquired prior to
the Treaty of Oregon should be dealt with on the principle
laid down by Her Majesty's Law Officers, and that as to those
which have been acquired since that Treaty and which were
alluded to more in detail in my communication to Sir Edw[ard]
Bulwer Lytton of the 12th October 1858, they should be
arranged upon the footing suggested by Mr Under Secretary
Merivale's letter of the 14th ulto.