82 ORAL ARGUMENT OF HON. EDWARD J. PHELPS. 



gory. That is a subject on whicli a great many people are able to 

 enlighten the world, without having had the advautage of any previous 

 education. Problems that occasion grave ditliculties to great lawyers 

 and judges, they are able to dispose of in a very short time. Then 

 there is another young gentleman who has written an argument and 

 printed it to the same effect. I have not the pleasure of knowing him. 

 These productions are about as much authority, I was going to say, 

 though they are really far less authority than the argumeHts of my 

 learned friends; the difference being that the arguments of my learned 

 friends come from gentlemen eminently qualified to make them, instead 

 of from those who are not qualihed at all. 



Then it is said that my friend. President Angell, of the University 

 of Michigan, a gentleman of very high standing, in a magazine article 

 has said that we have no such right. President Angell is not a law- 

 yer, and has had no o])portunity to see the United States Case, or to 

 know on what ground we put it, or what the ftxcts are. I should be 

 very willing, with those additional advantages, to submit this Case to 

 his judgment. He would frankly say i)robably, if he were enquired of, 

 that this was a casual, superficial expression upon a subject he had not 

 examined, with which he was not familiar, and in which he had assumed 

 as true what had been so largely claimed on the part of Canada at 

 least, if not of Great Britain. If we were going into pamphlet litera- 

 ture on this subject, I would rather commend an Article that has more 

 recently appeared from Mr. Tracy, a very eminent lawyer, in the 

 "North American Review-', which 1 have seen since I came here; and 

 an Article by Mr. Slater, one of the most eminent of British Naturalists, 

 in the " Nineteenth Century", which came out pending my learned 

 friends' argument on the other side. If these are the sources to which 

 we are to go, I think the weight of the magazine literature will be 

 found to be as much against my learned friends as authorities of a 

 higher character. With those exceptions, if we have misread Vattel 

 and Palfeiidorf, no other writer is produced to show it; no writer who 

 has put a different construction on those passages; no writer who has 

 affirmed the rule of law to be different from what we affirm it to be 

 here. It is to such sources as that that my learned friends have to go 

 for what is called authority. 



Now, it cannot be, at this age of the world, that in respect of prop- 

 erty of this kind contained in many seas, on many shores, the question 

 of the legal right of the nation to which it appertains to enjoy and 

 protect it can be new. It may be new as applied to the seals, or it 

 may not. It cannot be new in the sense in which Vattel and Puffen- 

 dorf discussed it. It can be found out one way or the other, and if we 

 are wrong, certainly the learning and diligence of my learned friends 

 must be able to show it. 



As I remarked the other day, the title of a nation comes by pos- 

 session and assertion, where that possession and assertion does not 

 controvert a right of another nation, or any established principle of 

 international law that is founded upon the rights of another nation. 

 It is possession, and assertion, in every case, as will be seen when we 

 refer again to the cases presented to you in the opening, that the title 

 of the nation stands on. They required no conveyance from anybody. 

 They made no treaty with anybody. In every case they stretched out 

 the hand of the national power and took possession of the adjacent 

 product, and ])roceeded to husband it and improve it, and to give the 

 world as well as themselves the benefit of it. If any nation had a 



