294 APPENDIX TO BRITISH CASE. 



Is England right ? If we trust the Secretary of State, in the view 

 which he takes of her claims, it would seem, as if the terms, the letter 

 of the Treaty, were on her side. This, Mr. Webster most peremptorily 

 admits, while others but debate it upon mere technicalities of lan- 

 guage. 



Mr. Webster says that 



it was undoubtedly an oversight in the Convention of 1818 to make so large a 

 concession to England, since the United States had usually considered that these 

 vast inlets or recesses of the ocean ought to be open to American fishermen, 

 as free as the sea itself, to within three miles of the shore. 



Here the whole is surrendered ; there is no escape from the admission. 



IT WAS AN OVERSIGHT TO MAKE SO LARGE A CONCESSION TO ENGLAND ! 



The concession was then made, was it not ? If so, the dispute is at 

 an end; and yet, even then, it were a hard task to justify the sum- 

 mary process through which England has sought to compel us to 

 compliance with the concession, particularly as she had, to say the 

 least of it, suffered our fishermen to haunt the Bay of Fundy, by 

 express allowance, in 1844, and to make their haunting other bays 

 rightful, by a continuous, open, and public enjoyment of them, ever 

 since the Convention of 1818. But to this I shall presently revert. 



" The precise words of the Treaty," says my friend from Maine, in 

 the remarkable speech he delivered the other day, " may, at first view, 

 seem to carry that construction ; " but he denies immediately that the 

 construction be correct; and so does the distinguished Senator from 

 Michigan, who has shed so much light on this controversy, and han- 

 dled with so rare a dexterity all the questions of secondary _right 

 arising under the Treaty of 1818. 



The honourable Senator from Massachusetts grants, that "by the 

 terms of the Treaty American fishermen are excluded from the coasts, 

 bays, harbours, and creeks," &c. "The British Government." says 

 he, " raise a question of construction, namely, that we cannot fish 

 within three miles of any of these bays; that we are excluded, to a 

 distance of three miles, not only from the coasts, but also from the 

 bays, including in that term the Bay of Fundy and other larger bays." 

 But with that peculiar energy which characterizes his manner of 

 argument, he also denies that such be the term of the exclusion, predi- 

 cates his own understanding of the Article upon the obvious meaning 

 which its whole context bears, and strenuously contends for the 

 American construction placed upon it. 



For my own part, Mr. President, I consider that the terms of the 

 Treaty need, in no wise, be defended upon such collateral issues. 

 Their true import stands on firmer ground than that of philological 

 discrimination or inferential argument. They are most clear and 

 precise, the very terms, the appropriate terms, for expressing that 

 which it was intended they should convey. Had our negotiations 

 spoken of bays and harbours, without specifying what bays and har- 

 bours they mean we should remain excluded from, there might be 

 room for doubt and for dispute. But they did not so speak. On the 

 contrary, they distinctly pointed to the specific places of exclusion; 

 t he bays, creeks, and harbours OF His MAJESTY'S DOMINIONS ; and the 

 question recurs: Which are the bays over which His Majesty could 

 claim dominion? 



