98 ARGUMENT OF THE UNITED STATES. 



private life and of that of the family does not come under the appli- 

 cation of public law. It is necessary, therefore, that the abuse be 

 public in order that the law may reach it. It belongs to the legisla- 

 tions regulating the various kinds of agricultural, industrial, and 

 commercial property, as well as to penal legislation, to determine the 

 abuses which it is important to protect; and, in reality legislations as 

 well as police laws, have always specified a certain number of cases of 

 abuses. 1 Besides, all abusive usage is hurtful to society, because it is 

 for the public interest that the object should give the owner the advan- 

 tages or the services it admits ci'. 2 



It is assumed throughout the Eeport of the British Commissioners 

 that pelagic sealing is not necessarily destructive, and that, under 

 regulation, the prosecution of it need not involve the extermination of 

 the herds. This assumption and the evidence bearing upon it will be 

 elsewhere particularly treated in what we may have to say upon the 

 subject of regulations. It will there be shown that it is not only 

 destructive in its tendency, but that, if permitted, it will complete the 

 work of practical extermination in a very short period of time. But 

 so far as it is asserted that a restricted and regulated pelagic sealing is 

 consistent with the moral laws of nature and should be allowed, the 

 argument has a bearing upon the claim of the United States of a prop- 

 erty interest, and should be briefly considered here. Let it be clearly 

 understood, then, just what pelagic sealing is, however restricted or 

 regulated. And we shall now describe it by those features of it which 

 arc not disputed or disputable. 



We pass by the shocking cruelty and inhumanity, with its sicken- 

 ing details of bleating and crying offspring falling upon the decks from 

 the bellies of mothers, as they are lipped open, and of white milk flow- 

 ing in streams mingled with blood. These enormities, which, if at- 

 tempted within the territory of a civilized State, would speedily be 



'On the occasion of the debate of Art. 541, which defined property, Napoleon 

 expressed energetically the necessity of suppressing abuses. '"The abuse of prop- 

 erty," said he, "should be suppressed every time it becomes hurtful to society. 

 Thus, it is not allowed to cut down unripe grain, to pull up famous grapevines. I 

 would not suffer that an individual should smite with sterility 20 leagues of 

 ground in a grain-hearing department, in order to make for himself a park thereof. 

 The right of abuse does not extend so far as to deprive a people of its sustenauce." 



2 Roman law says in this sense, sec. 2, 1, Do patr. pot. 1, 8: "Expedit euim reipubli- 

 cob ne sua requis male utatur." Leibnitz further expands this principle of the Roman 

 law by saying (De notionibus juris, etc.): "Cum nos nostraquo Deo debeamus, nt 

 reipublicse, ita inulto magis universi interest no quia re sua male utatur." 



