DESPATCHES, REPORTS, CORRESPONDENCE, ETC. 723 



all such will be $3 for every ton of the boat or vessel concerned. 

 Under the provisions of this treaty the Ella M. Doughty ', caught in 

 the ice, would have gone free, and the David J . Adams, which ran 

 across from Eastport into Digby basin for bait, if she had found her- 

 self snarled in the intricacies of foreign statutes and legal proceed- 

 ings, had the option to pay $3 per ton, or less than $200 in other 

 words, less than the amounts heretofore required as security for costs 

 and to pay expenses of defense in the vice-admiralty court and go 

 free or she could have demanded a summary and inexpensive trial 

 at the place of detention. 



It should be borne in mind that the statutes of Canada which we 

 have been discussing are not aimed particularly at vessels of the 

 United States, but include all foreign fishing vessels. While in all 

 respects, even with the modifications which the thirteenth article 

 imposes on them, they are not our statutes, and therefore not what 

 we would make them, yet several of these modifications are conces- 

 sions from principles and provisions which are found in our own 

 statutes, and concessions which we ourselves would not willingly 

 make in behalf of foreign vessels. On the whole, a careful examina- 

 tion of this section, taken in the light of the ordinary methods of 

 criminal proceedings wherever the common law exists, will 

 433 show a present desire on the part of Great Britain and Canada 

 to remove just cause of offense, and to cultivate the friendship 

 of the United States ; and to take it by and large, the net result must 

 be a modicum of those evils and misfortunes, through legal pro- 

 ceedings, which inevitably await strange vessels in foreign ports. 



Concerning the fifteenth article, further reference to the protocol 

 of May 4, 1871, of the joint commissioners who negotiated the treaty 

 of Washington will show, as already explained, that the American 

 commissioners preferred a settlement of the fishery questions " on a 

 comprehensive basis." After setting out other propositions, pro 

 and con, which were not agreed to, the protocol proceeds as follows: 



The subject of the fisheries was further discussed at the conferences held on 

 the 20th, 22d, and 25th of March. The American commissioners stated that, 

 if the value of the inshore fisheries could be ascertained, the United States might 

 prefer to purchase for a sum of money the right to enjoy in perpetuity the use 

 of those inshore fisheries in common with British fishermen. 



Our commissioners afterwards named $1,000,000 as the sum they 

 were prepared to offer. The British commissioners replied that this 

 offer was inadequate, and made some other objections to it. Subse- 

 quently our commissioners proposed as an equivalent for the inshore 

 fisheries that coal, salt, and fish should be reciprocally admitted free 

 at once, and lumber after the 1st of July, A. D. 1874, On the 17th 

 of April the British commissioners replied that they regarded this 

 latter offer as inadequate. Thereupon our commissioners withdrew 

 it, and the equivalents were finally negotiated, as found in the treaty. 



In framing the present convention this principle of negotiation 

 seems to have been held by the United States not admissible, but it 

 ought not be denied, if to purchase bait and in other ways make the 

 shores of Canada and Newfoundland the base of our fishing opera- 

 tions have a pecuniary or property value to the United States, an 

 equivalent therefor may justly be demanded by Great Britain. In 

 any bargaining for the same, however, all the parties concerned 

 should stand free and on equal footing. Great Britain in this article 



