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



st;ition on tlieronkery, even if it ran possibly rnn the gauntlet of driving tliroufijliout 

 every sealing season for five or six consecutive years; driven over and over again as 

 it is during each one of these sealing seasons. 



Therefore, it now appears plain to me, that those young male fur-seals which may 

 happen to survive this terrible strain of seven years of drivingoverlaud, are rendered 

 by this act of driving wholly worthless for breeding purposes — that they never go to 

 the breeding grounds and take up stations there, being utterly demoralized in spirit 

 and in body. 



This is also to be found in the British Counter-Case, at page 264. 



Now, Mr. President, it will probably occur to j-ou or to some other 

 Members of the Tribunal, though we have heard a great deal of the 

 inhumanity in relation to pelagic sealing, yet that probably, if the seal 

 could have its choice whether it would have itself knocked on the head 

 on the island after these renewed and protracted etibrts of cruelty, as 

 one alternative, or would take its chance of being shot in its natural 

 element as the other, if it is half as intelligent as my learned friends in 

 other portions of their argument assert it is, there can be very little 

 doubt which the seal would choose. I am dealing with this, not for the 

 puri)oseof attacking the numagementof the Islands, but for the purpose 

 of citing the man vouched by the United States as a great authority 



on the seal question. 

 904 Mr. Carter. — Where is that vouched for? 



Sir Charles Eussell. — Again, and again, and again; and I 

 will refer to the American authorities and executive officers of the 

 American Government who have referred to Mr. Elliott as a great 

 authority, one or more of them indeed referring to him as the only 

 authority on sealing. 



Mr. Carter. — You do not refer to anything in the evidence before 

 the Court. 



Sir Charles Russell. — I do indeed. Mr. Blaine's letters, among 

 others, refer to Mr. Elliott as the great authority on seal life; and 1 

 have certainly many other references. 



I was upon the point of showing what the character of this animal 

 is — that its helplessness on land arises from the fact that it is not really 

 a land animal. On the contrary, it is admitted that upon the sea it is 

 at home: that it is capable of easj^ progression many miles in a day, 

 without any unusual strain upon its vital powers. 



Now does it get its sustenance from the land? Not at all. It gets no 

 sustenance from the laud, and perhaps the passage I am now about to 

 read on the question of what it does feed upon, may suggest to this 

 Tribunal that if the fur-seal does perish from the face of the earth, as 

 the buffaloes have lierished from the face of the earth so far as Ameri- 

 can possessions are concerned, it will not be an unmixed evil. On page 

 72 of the same book to which I am now referring, and referring only for 

 this purpose, there occurs this description of the food of these anijnals. 



Lord Hannen. — I see it is in inverted commas. What is it quoted 

 from? 



Sir Charles Eussell. — It is a quotation from Mr. Elliott's earlier 

 Eeport of 1 874. 



Think of the enormous food consumption of these rookeries and hauling grounds; 

 what an immense quantity of tinny prey must pass down their voracious throats as 

 every year rolls by. 



A creature so full of life, strung with nerves muscles like bands of steel, cannot 

 live on air, or absorb it from tlie sea. Their food is fish, to the practical exclusion 

 of all other diet. I have never seen them touch, or disturb with the intention of 

 touching it, one solitary example in the flocks of water-fowl which rest upon the 

 surface of the water all about the islands. 



I was especially careful in noting this, because it seemed to me that canine arma- 

 ture of their mouths must suggest flesh for food at times as well as fish; but fish we 



