169 



&amp;lt; tion of the right of fishing upon the Bank of Newfoundland, ia 

 ;t favour of the French, as before.&quot; Valin, vol. 2, p. 693. 



And Jr. Jefferson, in his Report on the Fisheries, of 1st Febru 

 ary, 1791, had said : 



&quot; Spain had formerly relinquished her pretensions to a partici- 

 * pation in these fisheries, at the close of the preceding war : and 

 1 at the end of this, the adjacent continent and islands being divided 

 between the United States, the English, and French, (for the last 

 retained two small islands merely for this object,) the right of fish- 

 ing was appropriated to them also.&quot; 



I did not entertain a doubt that the object of the British govern 

 ment then was, to exclude us from the whole of this fishery, unless 

 upon our own coast ; nor do 1 now, that if we had then acquiesced 

 in their principle, they would have excluded us from it after the 

 peace entirely. 



I did, therefore, feel a deep and earnest solicitude for them. 

 Nor was that solicitude allayed by the discovery that there was in 

 the heart of the mission itself, a disposition and an influence operat 

 ing against them almost as inflexibly, and, in my estimation, far 

 more dangerously, than the British adversary himself. 



There were but two possible ways, after the British notification, 

 of preserving these rights and liberties from total extinction. The 

 one was, by obtaining a new recognition of them in the treaty, which 

 could not be done without offering an equivalent ; and the other 

 was, by asserting that they had not been forfeited by the war, and 

 would remain in full vigour, although the treaty should be conclud 

 ed without such an article. 



In preparing the draught of the treaty, Mr. Gallatinhad drawn an 

 article, stipulating anew the recognition, and offering, as the equiva 

 lent, the recognition of the British right to navigate the Mississippi, 

 contained in the same treaty of 1783, and of which the British ple 

 nipotentiaries had demanded the renewal. 



Mr. Gallatin was a citizen of the Western Country, and as inca 

 pable as any other member of the mission, of sacrificing an essen 

 tial interest of one quarter of the Union, to a minor interest of ano 

 ther. I was, therefore, profoundly mortified to see his article ob 

 jected to on a principle of conflicting sectional interest, and still 

 more so, to hear Mr. Russell observe, after his opinion had been 

 disclosed by his vote, that the fisheries were an interest of a disaf 

 fected part of the country. I was as far as Mr. Russell from ap 

 proving the policy or the measures then predominating in New- 

 England : but to cast away and surrender to the enemy the birth 

 right of my country, an interest as lasting as the ocean and the shores 

 of my native land, for a merely momentary aberration, rather of its 

 legislature than its people, was so far from meeting my concur 

 rence, that it sickened my soul to hear it hinted from one of her 

 own sons. 



Considered merely and exclusively with reference to sectional 

 interests, Mr. Gallatin s proposed article was fair and just. It pro- 



