288 ORAL ARGUMENT OF FREDERICK R. COUDERT, ESQ. 



which they may be justly punished. The British Commissioners, 

 whose work is the substratum of the case for Great Britain, say that 

 raids are occasionally committed because our guard system is inefti- 

 cient; that these guards are forbidden to shoot the raiders and that 

 we ought to have a more efticient protection for our own seals. I do 

 not understand that even they, with all the ardor of their advocacy, 

 dispute the proposition that we have the right to repel raids even by 

 force, but on the contrary, they accord to us and suggest that we should 

 use this privilege of slaying the marauders. 



But how far, it may be asked, does this reasoning affect the question? 

 Most materially; for if you concede that the sealers cnunot directly kill 

 our seals, then the question comes: May they do so iiidirectlyf I may 

 appeal to all the Arbitrators who have had a judicial experience, and 

 ask whether one of their most arduous duties has not been to prevent 

 men from doing by indirection that which the law absolutely inter- 

 dicted. The law orders that a certain thing shall be done or shall not 

 be done. Immediately the ingenuity of lawyers is set to work in the 

 interest of clients, to evade the prohibition and to annul the order. 

 The sagacity of the courts is seldom better employed than in trying to 

 lind how they may best and most properly baffle these efforts at violat- 

 ing the spirit while respecting the letter of the law. May it be said 

 that if these pups upon the Pribilof Islands are ours, we may not issue 

 a general edict of death against them ? If it be the fact that our power 

 goes thus for, may they be destroyed by others indirectly? Here is our 

 property, our pup, upon our land. It is suckled by its mother, and 

 must perish if that mother dies. May a pirate or poacher lie in ambush, 

 even, if you please, outside the three mile limit, wait until the nursing 

 mother has crossed that imaginary line, and then kill the pup by the 

 very act of killing the mother? What sense is there in such a doc- 

 trine as this? What principle is there to support such a view? If the 

 poacher, to give him a mild designation, may not attack me directly 

 and thus destroy my proi)erty, how can he do it thus indirectly, know- 

 ing at the time that he is destroying that indirectly which he has no 

 right to touch? 



I think it is difficult to give too much weight to this consideration; 

 and when I shall have shown to this High Tribunal that the destruc- 

 tion of the mother is the destruction of the pup, and that the pup is 

 under our dominion, in our hands, subject to our control and is our 

 proi)erty, then I will ask the Court to hold that these sealers cannot 

 indirectly do that which it is conceded they may not directly accom- 

 plish. If you destroy the means whereby I live, do you not take away 

 my life; and if you may not take away the life of these young and 

 heli)less animals by slaying them with a gun or a spear, may you do it 

 by the doubly barbarous method of killing the mother that makes exist- 

 ence {possible? 



Upon this point, and reverting to the nature of pelagic sealing, we 

 say not only that it is a practice barbarous and inhuman in itself, but 

 that it is opposed to the law of all civilized nations. It is opposed to 

 the law of the United States. It is o])posed to the law of Great Brit- 

 ain. In fact I know of no law which does not interfere to protect use- 

 ful animals, by preventing wholesale slaughter that is effected through 

 the medium of the mother. It is urged on both sides in considering 

 the question of international law, that the law common to all countries 

 is the one to be looked at; and our friends on the other side insist, and 

 I am not disposed to find any fanlt with this statement of their views, 

 that the law common to both countries, Great Britain and the United 



