PERTAINING TO NEGOTIATION OF TEEATY OF 1818. 273 



her lap a great portion of the profits of their hardy and laborious 

 industry; that these fisheries afforded the means of subsistence to a 

 numerous class of people in the United States, whose habit of life had 

 been fashioned to no other occupation, and whose fortunes had allot- 

 ted them no other possession ; that to another, and. perhaps, equally 

 numerous class of our citizens, they afforded the means of remittance 

 and payment for the productions of British industry and ingenuity, 

 imported from the manufactures of this united kingdom; that, by the 

 common and received usages among civilized nations, fishermen were 

 among those classes of human society whose occupations, contributing 

 to the general benefit and welfare of the species, were entitled to a 

 more than ordinary share of protection; that it was usual to spare 

 and exempt them even from the most exasperated conflicts of national 

 hostility: that this nation had, for ages, permitted the fishermen of 

 another country to frequent and fish upon the coasts of this island, 

 without interrupting them, even in times of ordinary war; that the 

 resort of American fishermen to the barren, uninhabited, and, for the 

 great part, uninhabitable rocks on the coasts of Nova Scotia, the Gulf 

 of St. Lawrence, and Labrador, to use them occasionally for the only 

 purposes of utility of which they are susceptible, if it must, in its na- 

 ture, subject British fishermen on the same coasts to the partial incon- 

 venience of a fair competition, yet produces, in its results, advantages 

 to other British interests equally entitled to the regard and fostering 

 care of their sovereign. By attributing to motives derived from such 

 sources as these the recognition of these liberties by His Majesty's 

 Government in the treaty of 1783, it would be traced to an origin 

 certainly more conformable to the fact, and surely more honorable to 

 Great Britain, than by ascribing it to the improvident grant of an 

 unrequited privilege, or to a concession extorted from the humiliating 

 compliance of necessity. 



In repeating, with earnestness, all these suggestions, it is with the 

 hope that from some, or all of them, Tlis Majesty's Government will 

 conclude the justice and expediency of leaving the North American 

 fisheries in the -late in which they have heretofore constantly existed, 

 and the fishermen of the United States unmolested in the enjoyment 

 of their liberl ies. 



I have, etc. John Quincy Adams. 



Lord Bathurst to Mr. Adams. 



Foreign Office, October SO, 1815. 



The undersigned, one of His Majesty's principal Secretaries <»f 

 State, had the honor of receiving the letter <>f the minister of the 

 United States, dated <1i<> 25th ultimo, containing the grounds upon 

 which the United States conceive themselves, at the present time, en- 

 titled to prosecute their fisheries within the limits of the British 

 sovereignty, and to use British territories for purposes connected 

 with the fisheri< 



A pretension "f this l<in<l was certainly intimated <»n b former 

 occasion, but in a manner so obscure that His Majesty's Government 

 were nol enabled even t<> conjecture the grounds upon which it could 

 be supported. 



