24 READJUSTMENT AFTER WAR 



who was plying his vocation out of sight of land 

 not to venture to do so within sixty miles of 

 the shore. Protests on these incidents evoked 

 from the British Foreign Office at last the 

 formal declaration that it claimed no right to 

 interfere with fishing on the high sea, but that 

 it would treat as extinct the liberty once recog 

 nized to Americans to take and cure fish on any 

 British coasts or bays. It was obviously high 

 time for serious effort to remove so disagree 

 able a situation as was thus created. 



In the negotiations on the subject the case 

 of the Americans was almost hopeless. The 

 inshore privileges long enjoyed were vital to 

 the prosperity of a great industry that cen 

 tred in Massachusetts. To maintain these 

 privileges, however, it was necessary to sus 

 tain two contentions that were desperately 

 weak, namely, that the &quot;liberty&quot; accorded by 

 the treaty of 1783 was in reality a right under 

 the law of nature and of nations, and that this 

 liberty or right had not been abrogated by the 

 war. Gallatin and Rush, the American pleni 

 potentiaries, as well as Secretary Adams, who 

 directed them, were adepts in the diplomatist s 

 art of extracting from the hazy realms of nature 

 and history the particular principle or prece- 



