Ethos

If we had a dime for every time someone waxed poetic about how inspiring, uplifting, and emotional governmental treaty documents are, we would not have very many dimes.

And that's by design.

See, all of the persuading and inspiring and convincing takes place long before official documents are written, signed, and ratified. By the time the ink was put to paper on the Louisiana Purchase treaty and conventions, the hard part—hashing out the details and making sure both parties were satisfied—was already done. Negotiations were complete.

Passionate arguments and their equally passionate counterarguments have no place in the actual text of governmental treaties.

Sure, we see a "happily reestablished" (T.0) friendship here and a "most favoured nations" (T.8.1) there, but overall, the happy-sappy stuff was left to the conversations that happened before and after the treaty and conventions were written.

Because the point of official documents is to be, well, official, and they can't get their officialdom on so well if they read like campaign speeches or love letters. Instead, they rely on the use of long titles, full names, Serious-Looking Capitalization, and a lot of "shalls" and "whereofs" to impress their officialness upon their audience.

This impressing thing is called "ethos," and ethos is all about creating credibility.

And it works: there really isn't any doubt that these three documents are the real deal, signed by important dudes doing important things on behalf of their important countries.

That's worth more than a few dimes in our book.