14 IN THE DIPLOMATIC SERVICE -VIII 



hundred miles. The return of these seal herds, and these 

 food excursions, were taken advantage of by Canadian 

 marauders, who slaughtered the animals, in the water, 

 without regard to age or sex, in a way most cruel and 

 wasteful ; so that the seal herds were greatly diminished 

 and in a fair way to extermination. Our government 

 tried to prevent this and seized sundry marauding ves 

 sels; whereupon Great Britain felt obliged, evidently 

 from political motives, to take up the cause of these Cana 

 dian poachers and to stand steadily by them. As a last 

 resort, the government of the United States left the mat 

 ter to arbitration, and in due time the tribunal began its 

 sessions at Paris. Meantime, a British commission was, 

 in 1891-1892, ordered to prepare the natural-history ma 

 terial for the British case before the tribunal; and it 

 would be difficult to find a more misleading piece of 

 work than their report. Sham scientific facts were 

 supplied for the purposes of the British counsel at 

 Paris. While I cannot believe that the authorities in 

 London ordered or connived at this, it is simple justice 

 to state, as a matter of fact, that, as afterward in the 

 Venezuela case, 1 so in this, British agents were guilty of 

 the sharpest of sharp practices. The Eussian fur-seal 

 islands having also suffered to a considerable extent from 

 similar marauders, a British commission visited the 

 Eussian islands and took testimony of the Eussian 

 commandant in a manner grossly unfair. This comman 

 dant was an honest man, with good powers of observation 

 and with considerable insight into the superficial facts of 

 seal life, but without adequate scientific training; his 

 knowledge of English was very imperfect, and the com 

 mission apparently led him to say and sign just what 

 they wanted. He was somehow made to say just the things 

 which were needed to help the British case, and not to say 

 anything which could hurt it. So absurd were the mis- 

 statements to which he had thus been led to attach his 



1 See my chapter on the Venezuela Commission for the trick attempted 

 by British agents in the first British Blue Book on that subject. 



