648 APPENDIX TO BRITISH CASE. 



measures be concerted by the United States to enforce and guard 

 their stipulations. With the Dominion of Canada the Government 

 at Washington is not called, or required, or to be expected, either 

 to deliberate or debate, any more than is the British Crown, with 

 a separate member of our Union. It is not to be supposed 

 387 that a local colonial court will, on the trial of a suit for for- 

 feiture begun under an imperial or a colonial statute, hear or 

 decide an issue, with the treaty of 1818, or rules of international law, 

 or those statutes. Nor will those courts award damages for seizures 

 in violation of the treaty, if made on " probable cause " by the seizors 

 to believe that the statutes had been violated. Nor can the United 

 States appeal to colonial courts for redress against the possible con- 

 duct of those courts under influences of local passion or prejudice. 



It plainly appears to your committee from the foregoing consid- 

 erations that, by the treaty of peace in 1783, American citizens be- 

 came partners with British subjects in all the coast fisheries in North 

 America remaining to Great Britain ; that the treaty of Ghent, which 

 closed the war of 1812, not having referred to the stipulations of the 

 treaty of peace in any way affecting the fisheries, Great Britain there- 

 upon urged and obtained in 1818 a diminution of American liberty 

 to take fish on certain well-defined portions of the British coast in 

 North America; that in 1819 there was enacted by Parliament, sit- 

 ting in London, a law in execution of that treaty which punished by 

 forfeiture of vessel and cargo a preparation to fish, and only by a 

 fine a refusal or neglect to depart on a warning or notice so to do; 

 that in 1844 the Island of Prince Edward enacted a law in punish- 

 ment of what it assumed to be a violation of the treaty of 1818, which 

 went far beyond the imperial statute of 1819; that in 1868 the Cana- 

 dian Senate and House of Commons prescribed additional proceed- 

 ings and penalties not warranted by the treaty, which were in 1870 

 made more severe and unwarranted and that in 1886, nearly half a 

 century after signing the treaty, an offence, entirely new in legisla- 

 tion, was denounced in most general terms and punished by confis- 

 cation of everything seized. 



THE BRITISH CROWN PROCLAIMS NON-INTERCOURSE. 



A very serious feature of this last-named legislation is that it has 

 been approved by the British Crown, and it proclaims non-inter- 

 course in Canada with American fishing vessels for general purposes 

 of trade. To that alarming feature your committee has given care- 

 ful consideration, and is unanimously of opinion that if, and so long 

 as, non-intercourse with American fishing vessels shall be thus main- 

 tained in the ports or bays of the Dominion of Canada or Newfound- 

 land, a non-intercourse should be immediately begun and maintained 

 in our own ports .against Canadian vessels. Those vessels, whether 

 trading or fishing, have, within the meaning of the seventeenth sec- 

 tion of the Law of Congress of 19th June, 1886, " been placed on the 

 same footing" in our ports as our own vessels clearing or entering 

 " foreign." Canadian vessels are British vessels. The British Crown 

 has denied to American fishing vessels commercial privileges ac- 

 corded to other national vessels in Canadian ports. The motive and 

 purpose of such denial have been openly and plainly avowed by Can- 

 ada to be, first, the punishment of such vessels because the United 



