1396 NOBTH ATLANTIC COAST FISHERIES ARBITRATION. 



way as to interfere with the nets of others; and enabled judges to 

 make regulations as to seines in creeks and harbours. Then, in 

 1818, the very year of the treaty, there was a New Brunswick statute 

 (British Case Appendix p. 605), which prohibited the throwing of 

 offal into the harbours. 



I pass on then to the negotiations for the treaty of 1818, and as to 

 that I have but two observations to make. Between these dates 

 1783 and 1818 as I have just shown, British Legislatures had been 

 accustomed to enact regulations. There is not the slighest hint any- 

 where of any protest from the United States in that regard. There 

 is no suggestion that the United States had thought that they pos- 

 sessed any share in the sovereignty between these dates. If any 

 such suggestion has been made, we would certainly have heard of 

 it during the negotiations which lasted from 1815, between Mr. 

 Adams and Lord Bathurst, until 1818. During the whole of that 

 time there is no suggestion anywhere of any disagreement as to the 

 British right to enact regulations as had always been done, and no 

 suggestion on the part of the Americans that they had any share in 

 the sovereignty. The time of the negotiations would, of course, 

 have been the time to settle any such question, if any such question 

 had existed ; and the British Government would have been in a very 

 good position to have remedied any defect in the treaty of 1783, if 

 any there had been; because we know that that Government was 

 acting a very generous part not only giving up what the Americans 

 had specifically asked for the south shore of Newfoundland and 

 the coast of Labrador but actually throwing in, without it being 

 demanded, the west coast of Newfoundland and the Magdalen 

 Islands. It is not conceivable that the British Government was 

 handing over, without even having been asked for it, the sovereignty 



in these additional districts. 



843 The only other observation I have to make in this regard is 

 that during these negotiations, as Mr. Warren showed us at 

 considerable length, coastal waters were always spoken of as " within 

 the exclusive jurisdiction of Great Britain," "within the limits of 

 the British sovereignty," " within the maritime limits " varied ex- 

 pressions that all mean the same thing, and that is that the coastal 

 waters were within the exclusive jurisdiction of Great Britain ex- 

 pressions which render it impossible, as I submit, to imagine that the 

 users of them had any idea whatever that a share of the sovereignty 

 had become vested in the United States by the treaty of 1783. The 

 United States printed Argument gives a collection of these expres- 

 sions at pp. 133, 139, and 143 ; but they are so fresh in the minds of 

 the arbitrators, and they were so much referred to, not only by Mr. 

 Warren but by myself, when I spoke about them this morning, that 



