204 ARGUMENT OF THE UNITED STATES. 



tary reduction of the number to be taken on the islands to 10,000. 

 Of course, with a further withdrawal from the market of the supply 

 furnished by the islands, to the amount of 40,000 skins annually, that 

 is to say. by leaving - practically the ivhole market to be supplied by the 

 pelagic sealers, a force in the shape of vessels and men would speedily 

 show itself sufficient to slaughter, not 00,000 females a season, but 

 100,000, and even more, between the first of May and the 15th of Sep- 

 tember. But we fail to perceive the use, or the consistency, of imposing a 

 limit to which such voluntary reductions of slaughter on the breeding 

 islands should be carried by making the minimum 10,000. Why should 

 the United States not be permitted, if they desired, to purchase a pro 

 tected zone of 60 miles radius by giving up the right to slaughter a 

 single seal? The scheme had as its sole merit some poor pretension in 

 the way of comicality. Why should this be thrown away? 



(2) We may be told that we are really, if not avowedly, imputing to 

 these Commissioners an intention to protect and promote the interests 

 of the Canadian sealers, and that this is unfair; that if they are labor- 

 ing in behalf of pelagic sealing, they are working as much for the inter- 

 est of citizens of the United States as for Canadians, inasmuch as 

 pelagic sealing is as open to the former as it is to the latter. We do 

 not forget the suggestion of the Commissioners to this effect, 1 and we 

 remember at the same time, what was well known to them, that this 

 occupation is not unreservedly open to citizens of the United States. That 

 nation deems itself bound by the spirit and principles of the law of nature, 

 holds itself under an obligation to use the natural advantages which 

 have fallen to its lot, by cultivating this useful race of animals to the 

 end that it may furnish its entire increase to those for whom nature in- 

 tended it, wherever they dwell, and without danger to the stock. It 

 holds, as the law of nature holds, that the destruction of the species by 

 barbarous and indiscriminate slaughter is a crime, and punishes it with 

 severe penalties. Its enactments adopted when it was supposed that 

 the only danger of illegitimate slaughter was confined to Bering Sea 

 were supposed to be adequate to prevent all such slaughter. Are the 

 United States to be deprived of the benefit of the seals unless they 

 choose to abandon and repudiate the plain obligations of morality and 

 natural law? 



1 Report of Br. Corn., p. 20. 



