JURISDICTIONAL AND OTHER RIGHTS OVER BERING SEA. 35 



The second offer of Lord Salisbury to arbitrate, amounts simply to a 

 submission of tlie question whether any country has a right to extend 

 its jurisdiction more than one marine league from the shore. No one 

 disputes that, as a rule; but the question is, whether there may not be 

 exceptions whose enforcement does not interfere with those highways of 

 commerce which the necessities and usage of the world have marked 

 out. * * * 



The repeated assertions that the Government of the United States 

 demands that the Bering Sea be pronounced mare clausum, are with- 

 out foundation. The Government has never claimed it and never de- 

 sired it. It expressly disavows it. At the same time the United States 

 does not lack abundant authority, according to the ablest exponents of 

 international law, for holding a small section of the Bering Sea for 

 the protection of the fur-seals. Controlling a comparatively restricted 

 area of water for that one specific purpose is by no means the equiva- 

 lent of declaring the sea, or any part thereof, mare clausum. Nor is it 

 by any means so serious an obstruction as Great Britian assumed to make 

 in the South Atlantic, nor so groundless an interference with the com- 

 mon law of the sea as is maintained by British authority to-day in the 

 Indian Ocean. The President does not, however, desire the long post- 

 ponement which an examination of legal authorities from Ulpian to 

 Phillimoie and Kent would involve. He finds his own views well ex- 

 pressed by Mr. Phelps, our late minister to England, when, after failing 

 to secure a just arrangement with Great Britain touching the seal 

 fisheries, he wrote the following in his closing communication to his own 

 Government, September 12, 1888: 



" Much learning has been expended upon the discussion of the ab- 

 stract question of the right of mare clausum. I do not conceive it to be 

 applicable to the present case. 



" Here is a valuable fishery and a large and, if properly managed, 

 permanent industry, the property of the nation on whose shores it is 

 carried on. It is proposed by the colony of a foreign nation, in defi- 

 ance of the joint remonstrance of all the countries interested, to de- 

 stroy this business by the indiscriminate slaughter and extermination 

 of the animals in question, in the open neighboring sea, during the 

 period of gestation, when the common dictates of humanity ought to 

 protect them, were there no interest at all involved. And it is sug- 

 gested that we are prevented from defending ourselves against such 

 depredations because the sea at a certain distance from the coast is free. 



"The same line of argument would take under its protection piracy 

 and the slave trade when prosecuted in the open sea, or would justify 

 one nation in destroying the commerce of another by placing dangerous 

 obstructions and derelicts in the open sea near its coasts. There are 

 many things that can not be allowed to be done on the open sea with 

 impunity, and again st which every sea is mare clausum ; and the right of 

 self-defense as to person and property prevails there as fully as else- 

 where. If the fish upon Canadian coasts could be destroyed by scat- 

 tering poison in the open sea adjacent, with some small profit to those 

 engaged in it, would Canada, upon the just principles of international 

 law, be held defenseless in such a case? Yet that process would be no 

 more destructive, inhuman, and wanton than this. 



" If precedents are wanting for a defense so necessary and so proper, 

 it is because precedents for such a course of conduct are likewise un- 

 known. The best international law has arisen from precedents that 

 have been established when the just occasion for them arose, undeterred 

 by the discussion of abstract and inadequate rules." 



