127 



Sir John Thompson spoke of the generosity of the British Govern- 

 ment in treating with the United States for the preservation of the 

 fur-seals. There was as much generosity on one side as on the other, 

 and none on either. It was a business matter relating to material in- 

 terests and, I may well assert, of equal importance to both high con- 

 tracting powers, which took its origin in what Sir John has aptly termed 

 the "bursting in" of the Canadians into Bering Sea in 1886. It was 

 a sudden "bursting in," and had the appearance of a violent and de- 

 fiant experiment — a raid. Canada and the United States since 1818 

 have had many severe contentions over the fisheries of the northeastern 

 coast, in which arrests of ships and of persons have led to very earnest 

 discussion. The United States, claiming certain treaty rights there, 

 have not burst into any of the waters that Canada has claimed as her 

 fishing preserve, although her people have been treated there with 

 severe inhospitality. 



That Government has preferred to prevent collision and strife by 

 restraining her people from bursting into places where they believed 

 that their rights entitled tliem to go. It was an easy matter for Canada 

 to have propounded its claim of rights to the United States, and to have 

 had them decided upon without permitting her citizens to go into 

 Bering Sea with their vessels and hunters armed with double barreled 

 shot guns and hunt seals up to the 3-mile limit, which she now admits 

 should be 10 miles as to such hunting. It was quite as easy for Can- 

 ada to restrain her citizens from bursting into Bering Sea as it was to 

 enact her system of very stringent laws to protect her preserve of hair 

 seals 1,000 miles from Canada, in the open ocean off the coast of Green- 

 land. If Canada had passed any reasonable laws for protecting these 

 interests of the United States, even during negotiations, a serious dis- 

 turbance of neighborly feeling could have been avoided, and fearful 

 havoc in the seal herds passing her coasts would have been prevented. 

 The enactment of such a law would have enabled the United States 

 to have controlled her own people as to hunting seals in the North 

 Pacific without incurring the reproach from them of denying to them 

 the privileges that Canadian subjects enjoyed on the high seas, and of 

 allowing them to reap all the profits of the massacre of the fur-seals. 

 The policy of Canada has made it impossible for Congress to restrain 

 the people of the United States from participating in this reckless 

 destruction, and from this defiance of her public policy and laws. Yet, 

 in the presence of this obvious legislative impossibility, it seems equally 



