278 APPENDIX TO BRITISH CASE. 



has hitherto been resisted, on the ground that that bay is included with 

 the British possessions. 



Her Majesty's Government feel satisfied that the Bay of Fundy has been 

 rightly claimed by Great Britain as a bay, within the Treaty of 1818: but they 

 conceive that the relaxation of the exercise of that right will be attended with 

 mutual advantage to both countries to the United States, as conferring a 

 material benefit to the fishing trade, and to Great Britain and the United States 

 conjointly and equally, by the removal of a fertile source of disagreement 

 between them. It has accordingly been announced to the United States Gov- 

 ernment that American citizens would henceforward be allowed to fish in any 

 part of the Bay of Fundy, provided they do not approach, except in cases 

 specified in the Treaty of 1818, within three miles of the entrance of any bay 

 on the coast of Nova Scotia or New Brunswick. 



I have, &c., STANLY. [STANLEY.] 



165 Now, Mr. President, I take it for granted, that no one who 



knows the course of British statesmen, and the instincts of the 

 British people upon all questions touching territorial rights or inter- 

 ests, will doubt for an instant that this concession, as they call it, but 

 recognition, as we consider it, was made in the conviction that the right 

 was with us ; at any rate, in the full persuasion that the pretension of 

 England was so doubtful that they ought not to hold on to it. And 

 as Mr. Everett justly remarks, the principle of this acquiescence ap- 

 plies with equal force to the other larger bays, and particularly to 

 the great estuary of the St. Lawrence ; and it is pretty clear that the 

 British Ministers suffered themselves to be driven from their proper 

 course in the application of their own principle elsewhere, in the other 

 bays and waters, by the unreasonable clamour and remonstrances of 

 the colonies. 



Now, Sir, this acquiescence in our practical construction of the 

 Treaty was an absolute surrender oi the point in dispute ; and it is 

 too late in the day to recall the step. Nations cannot safely play the 

 game of fast and loose, of give and take at pleasure, with one another, 

 in the practical exposition of their conventional arrangements. It 

 will not do. Nothing is gained; on the contrary, things are made 

 worse by such temporary recognitions, to be resumed or changed when 

 the opposite party is most strongly convinced by time and usage of 

 its rights. England had just the same interest in our exclusion from 

 the great arms of the ocean in 1842 which she has at this time; and 

 her surrender of the point then implies her own views of the case, 

 and the ten years which have since intervened, unquestioned, have 

 been enough to place our rights beyond dispute. 



An attempt has Keen made to show a difference between our rights 

 and liberties designations first used in the Treaty of 1783, and 

 transferred from that instrument to the Convention of 1818 and 

 thereby to establish the pretension that the one is more indefeasible 

 than the other. And I regret to see, Sir, that this effort is counte- 

 nanced by the views of some of our own journals honestly I have 

 no doubt, but erroneously I am satisfied. I do not suppose that an 

 Englishman can be found from Johnny Groat's house to the Lands 

 End who will not firmly believe in the claim of England in this case, 

 as he believes it in all other cases. No man will accuse the English 

 people of a want of patriotic ardour ; and it is rare, indeed, that their 

 demands upon foreign nations are not supported by the almost unani- 

 mous sentiment of the country. I wish we had a little more of this 

 feeling not enough to blind us to the truth, but enough to render it 

 a source of congratulation to find our Government in the right. In 



