448 APPENDIX TO BRITISH CASE. 



utterly afloat and undecided. My purpose in making these remarks 

 is, in part, to show your honors what a precarious position a state 

 holds which undertakes to set up this right of exclusion and to put 

 it in execution. The international law makes no attempt to define 

 what is " coast." We know well enough what a straight coast is, and 

 what a curved coast is; but the moment they come to bays, harbors, 

 gulfs, and seas, they are utterly afloat as much as the sea -weed that 

 is swimming up and down their channels. They make no attempt 

 to define it, either by distance or by political or natural geography. 

 They say at once, " It is difficult, where there are seas and bays." 

 Names will not help us. The Bay of Bengal is not national property; 

 it is not the King's chamber ; nor is the Bay of Biscay, nor the Gulf 

 of Saint Lawrence, nor the Gulf of Mexico. Names will not help us. 

 An inlet of the sea may be called a " bay," and it may be two miles 

 wide at its entrance ; or it may be carlled a " bay," and it may take a 

 month's passage in an old-fashioned sailing vessel to sail from one 

 headland to the other. What is to be done about it? If there is to 

 be a three-mile line from the coast, the natural result is, that that 

 three-mile line should follow the bays. The result then would be 

 that a bay more than six miles wide was an international bay; one 

 six miles wide, or less, was a territorial bay. That is the natural 

 result. Well, nations do not seem to have been contented with this. 

 France has made a treaty with England saying that anything less 

 than ten miles wide shall be a territorial bay. 



The difficulties on that subject are inherent, and, to my mind, they 

 are insuperable. England claimed to exclude us from fishing in the 

 Bay of Fundy, and it was left to referees, of whom Mr. Joshua Bates 

 was umpire, and they decided that the Bay of Fundy was not a ter- 

 ritorial bay of Great Britain, but a part of the high seas. This 

 decision was put partly upon its width; but the real ground was, 

 that one of the assumed headlands belonged to the United States, and 

 it was necessary to pass the headland in order to get to one of the 

 towns of the United States. For these special reasons, the Bay of 

 Fundy, whatever its width, was held to be a public and international 

 bay. 



Then look at Bristol Channel. That question came up in the case 

 of Queen v. Cunningham. A crime was committed by Cunningham 

 in the Bristol Channel, more than three miles from the shore of 

 Glamorganshire, on the north side, and more than three miles 

 267 from Devonshire and Somersetshire, on the south side. Cun- 

 ningham was indicted for a crime committed in Glamorgan- 

 shire. The place where the vessel lay was high up in the channel, 

 somewhere about 90 miles from its mouth, and yet not as far up as 

 the river Severn. The question was, whether that was a part of the 

 realm of Great Britain, so that a man could be indicted for a crime 

 committed there. Now, there is a great deal of wisdom in the de- 

 cision made in that case. The court say, substantially, that each case 

 is a case sui generis. It depends upon its own circumstances. Eng- 

 lishmen and Welshmen had always inhabited both banks of the 

 Bristol Channel. Though more than ten miles in width at its en- 

 trance, it still flowed up into the heart of Great Britain; houses, 

 farms, towns, factories, churches, court-houses, jails everything on 

 its banks ; and it seemed a preposterous idea, and I admit it, that in 



