90 



to protect tlie seal herd and to iiidenniify its Treasury by levying a tax 

 ui)on the pelts of the seals taken under their laws and regulations. 



This public and governmental necessity and right is not denied, but 

 if it was, the United States would still be the sole and sovereign judge 

 of that duty. Tn fact, the revenues so derived are not sufficient to pay 

 all the expenses of administration in the perihius and costly police of the 

 islands and the seas around them for the protection of seal life and the 

 conduct of this industry. 



If we turn to the photographic plates produced in evidence, those 

 historians that can not use words to abuse the truth, we see at a glance 

 what it must have cost the United States already to have converted 

 these desolate islands into places of decent abode, and those wretched 

 savages into self-repecting people worthy of a place and a name among 

 civilized and Christian i^eoples. The United States can not aftbrd 

 to allow these people to relapse into savage barbarity. It can not 

 abandon them to a cruel and destructive fate, and this tribunal 

 can not afford to search for some reason for assisting such a relapse, 

 alone in legal decisions made under municipal laws in England or 

 elsewhere in private lawsuits between private litigants about pheas- 

 ants and rooks and rabbits. These two Governments have found it 

 necessary, in order to secure justice and peace between their people iind 

 to repress a slaughter of useful animals, which is wasteful, destruc- 

 tive, unnecessary, and inhuman, to remove the controversy beyond the 

 reach of the influence of the mere cupidity of men eager for private 

 gain, into the higher plane of a contest between nations. It is no longer 

 a case in which men who are citizens of the United States can accuse 

 their Government of a mean purpose of making illicit gains for its revenues 

 by a tax on fur-seal pelts, or of aiding a monopoly granted to favorites; 

 or in which renegade citizens can be allowed to abuse the laws ot the 

 United States by the surreptitious use of the flag of Great Britain. 



These Governments are pledged to find a way, by means of the award 

 the tribunal shall make, to protect and preserve these seals, and they 

 can not and will not permit them again to become the prey of private 

 cupidity. It is only the private greed for gain at any sacrifice of great 

 public interest and duties that calls in question the imblic right and 

 duty of protecting the seals by international action. To dignify this 

 opposition of the seekers for private gain into a business that rises above 

 the duty of nations towards the peace and prosperity of the world, the 

 reckless and destructive methods of the pelagic hunter are raised to 



