40 ORAL ARGUMENT OF SIR CHARLES RUSSELL, Q. C. M. P. 



SO to make tliem. I have not tlie book here, but 1 have sent for it, and 

 if it is not, as it probably is, in the library of the learned President, I 

 would ask him to peruse upon the subject of natural selection and on 

 the doctrine of the survival of the fittest, a book with which 1 have no 

 doubt he is generally familiar — I mean Darwin, and he supplies from 

 actual observation as well as from argument an admirable answer, if I 

 may respectfully say so, to thedoul)ts which the learned President was 

 suggesting. 1 am told that the book has arrived, but I have not had 

 the oi)portunity of refreshing my recollection with reference to the 

 passages by to it, so I will not stop, but will leave it to my learned 

 friend if he should think fit to refer to it. 



Then there are other matters also to be taken into consideration, 

 besides the absence of anything like accurate information upon some 

 of the important conditions of seal life, pointing, as 1 submit, in the 

 direction of temporary rather than permanent Eegulations, and, fairly 

 considered, this is not an argument that would not be equally to the 

 interests of the United States for the reason I have already mentioned. 

 Further consideration in a possible change of circumstances which is 

 not at all an unlikely thing to happen may become necessary. Fashions 

 may change. In the case there are mentioned the elaborate efforts 

 which are ingenious and cost money, which the representatives of the 

 lessees made in order to create a fashion in seal skins, and I do not 

 know whether I have mentioned it before, but it is a fact stated to be 

 historically true, that when the Hudson's Bay Company were anxious to 

 get their furs into popularity in London — I am not sure that I have not 

 mentioned this before — they invited the co-operation of a celebrated 

 dandy of that day — no less a person than Beau Brummell, and Beau 

 Brummell was induced to accept the gift of a coat made of the skins 

 of martens, and he was able to induce his friend, the Prince Eegejit to 

 do the same thing, with the result that the particular skins in question 

 became very jiopular. We know the shifting of these fashions. Take 

 the case again of the beaver hat. It was once supposed to be a necessity 

 of civilization, but who wears a beaver hat now ? Why do not Miey wear 

 them "? Because they have an artificial substitute, so that one cannot 

 predicate with any kind of certainty what the circumstances may be 

 at any future time. Or again, the fact that the seal may leave the 

 place, because of some change of food supply in the broader ocean — 

 which may drive them closer to land and might interfere with some of 

 the great industries carried on in the United States as well as British 

 Columbia. 



My learned friend, Mr. Eobinson, was perfectly right, that if there were 

 ten thousand Regulations forbidding the destruction of the fur-seals, 

 if they were found to conflict with any of those industries, the fur-seal 

 is inevitably doomed to go. All these considerations, as it seems to 

 me, point to the expediency of making not permanent hard and fast 

 rules which purport to operate forever but to the making of regulations 

 which would exist for a time sufficiently long to allow experience to be 

 matured, so that the future consideration of the problem, if it still 

 exists to be considered, should be approached in the light of fuller and 

 ampler and more detailed information than can now be presented to 

 this Tribunal, ft might possibly be suggested as an alternative that 

 while you make your liegulations apparently perpetual in their char- 

 acter, there might be reserved to either of the Powers to denounce the 

 Regulations after the expiry of a definite number of years, the effect 

 of which would be to remit the parties respectively to their original 

 position and therefore their original rights, whatever those rights were, 



