ORAL ARGUMENT OF HON. EDWARD J. PHELPS. 9 



ex|ierience — few men living are perhaps his ennal — and who felt quite 

 as strongly as my learned friends feel that England could not put itself 

 on record before the world by justifying the action of Canada, to transfer 

 the discussion in some measnre from the actual facts that were going on 

 in Behring Sea and the North Pacific, to the old story about the Ukase 

 of 1821 put forth by Kussia and subsequently more or less modified at 

 the instance of the two countries. Finally, Mr. BUiine was drawn 

 into a discussion of this, and 1 need not say, discussed it with great 

 ability. We shall not shrink from that discussion at its ai)propriate 

 l)lace, as a 8upi)ort and corroboration to a title which we prefer to put 

 in its origin on stronger and clearer grounds. And when it is said tliat 

 Mr. Blaine remarked that if the Behring Sea was included in the 

 Pacific Ocean within the meaning of the Treaties of 1824 and 1825, the 

 United States had no further claims, we will see whether such a remark 

 was justified or not, and whether he could not have safely stood there. 

 It is not because we hesitate in attempting to support the views 

 expressed by Mr. Blaine in this correspondence, that we put those ques- 

 tions in a secondary place. It is because they are secondary, necessa- 

 rily and unavoidably, and could not bemade otherwise, even if we agreed 

 to consider them as primary. 



Then, say my learned friends, still avoiding the plain issue of fact, 

 this is a question of the freedom of the sea. You must beware how 

 you step. You are approaching dangerous ground. You are in danger 

 of interfering with the freedom of the sea; and, in the Attorney Gen- 

 eral's concluding observations the other day, he remarked in very elo- 

 quent language, which his own emotion showed was not mere rhetoric, 

 that the question is one of the freedom of the sea, important far beyond 

 and above the preservation of the seal. 



It is a question of the freedom of the sea. I accept that issue. I 

 agree that it is a question of the freedom of the sea, but it is not 

 whether the sea at this day is free in the general acceptation of that 

 term. That question has been settled for more than a century, and the 

 United States is the last Government in the world that could attord to 

 have the determination of it changed. Not all the seals in the world 

 would compensate the United States for having the freedom of naviga- 

 tion, of commerce, of passage, and of use of all the open seas of the 

 globe fail to be maintained intact. But the question is, what are the 

 limits of the freedom of the sea? How far does it go? Where does it 

 stop? Is it mere absence of restraint, the absence of law; an unbridled 

 and unlimited freedom to do on the sea what the laws of all civilized 

 countries repress everywhere else? Is that what was conceded by the 

 nations, when a hundred years ago they came by common consent to 

 change the old doctrine of mare claii,mni that had always prevailed till 

 then, whenever it was fouiul desirable by a maritime nation to assert 

 it, into the doctrine of mare libervmf How much did they give away? 

 How much did they surrender? Why the moment you atteuqjt to give 

 freedom such a definition upon the high sea as it obtains nowhere 

 else on earth, you restore piracy; you restore every outrage cai)able of 

 being perpetrated on the sea. It is manifest that is not what the free- 

 dom of the sea means. It has limits; there are things we cannot do 

 upon the sea; there are bounds we cannot overstep. Where does 

 freedom begin to be regulated by law? 1 shall come to that further on. 



Now, in passing away for the present from the subject of the freedom 

 of the sea, our general proj)osition, which I may state as well here as any- 

 where, is this: — that this slaughter of the seals, which 1 have attempted 

 to describe, is, in the first i)Iace, barbarous and inhuman, and wrong in 



