Mr. Fish to Mr. Blow
Sir: I have to acknowledge the receipt of your dispatch (without number) of the 10th, with inclosure, relating to the complaint of Mr. Thomas Rainey against certain action of the authorities of Brazil. I have examined these voluminous documents sufficiently to ascertain that Mr. Rainey’s grievances, real or supposed, arise out of one or more contracts into which he voluntarily entered with the Brazilian government, as well in his private capacity as that of the representative of a corporation or joint-stock association, organized under the laws of Brazil.
The following extract from instructions recently addressed to Mr. De Long, minister to Japan, and which, in substance, have been repeatedly addressed to other ministers, will apprise you of the views of this Department in relation to such cases. The considerations which forbid public intervention have peculiar force where the parties asking it are the members of a foreign corporation:
“Another class of claims is those against the government of Japan, not springing from torts, but founded on contract, express or implied. In respect to such claims, the policy and practice of this Government has been in accordance with the principle stated by John Quincy Adams, then Secretary of State, in a letter to the Spanish minister at this capital, dated April 29, 1823, in these terms: ‘With regard to contracts of an individual born in one country with the government of another, most expressly when the individual contracting is domiciliated in the country with whose government he contracts, and formed the contract voluntarily for his own private emolument, and without the privity of the nation under whose protection he had been born, he has no claim whatever to call upon the government of his nativity to espouse his claim, this government having no right to compel that with which he voluntarily contracted to the performance of that contract.
“‘Such cases have accordingly not been regarded as proper subjects of public intervention, but have, when the merits of the claim appeared clear, been commended to the attention of our diplomatic representatives, with a view to the exertion, unofficially, of his friendly influence to procure an examination and equitable adjustment by the government concerned.’”
You would appear from the papers to have given to Mr. Rainey’s case all the attention to which it is entitled.
I am, &c.,