ARGUMENT OF JOHN S. EWAKT. 1431 



of the British Empire as the result of the success of the American 

 Revolution, apportioned to each of the divided parts, to be thereafter 

 held by each of them as national possessions, an equal right in those 

 fisheries. 



" This was very far from a contention that citizens of the United 

 States were merely enjoying the fishery rights which they had for- 

 merly enjoyed as subjects of the British Crown, and *that their 

 present rights were only a continuation of their former rights. While 

 the right is in essence the same right and grows out of the former 

 right, it was formerly enjoyed by the Americans as British subjects, 

 but it is now enjoyed by them as American citizens. They enjoyed it 

 before by permission of the Crown which owned all the fisheries; 

 they enjoy it now as a national right." 



I will seek, Sirs, to trouble the Tribunal with a good many refer- 

 ences for the purpose of establishing that what we are alleged to have 

 erroneously attributed to the United States has been the view of the 

 American Government, or the view, at all events, of the American 

 men who were speaking if not officially on the part of the Govern- 

 ment, yet while they were framing the ideas by which the Government 

 was directed, that those men held the view that we attribute to the 

 United States, namely, that the treaty of 1783 merely recognised 

 and continued the rights which the fishermen of the United States 

 possessed as subjects of the British Crown. And I shall argue, when 

 those extracts have been finished, that the effect of that contention 

 necessarily is, as set up in the extract from the British Case which I 

 have just read, that a continuation of the rights formerly held by 

 British subjects, after and by the treaty of 1783, was necessarily a 

 continuation in the same position as prior to the treaty of 1783. 



From the United States Counter-Case Appendix, p. 618, I quote 

 from Mr. John Adams, who was one of the negotiators of the treaty 

 of 1783. I read from a point near the foot of the page, at the 

 figure 2 : 



" We have a right (I know not very well how to express it) but 

 we have the rights of British subjects. Not that we are now British 

 subjects; not that we were British subjects at the treaty of 1783, but 

 as having been British subjects, and entitled to all the rights, lib- 

 erties, privileges, and immunities of British subjects, which we had 

 possessed before the revolution, which we never had surrendered, for- 

 feited, or relinquished, and which we never would relinquish any 

 farther than in that treaty is expressed. Our right was clear and 

 indubitable to fish in all places in the sea where British subjects had 

 fished or ever had a right to fish." 



I refer next to the United States Case Appendix, p. 318, and from 

 that page I quote again from Mr. Adams, under the No. 6: 



" We considered that treaty as a division of the empire. Our inde- 

 pendence, our rights to territory and to the fisheries, as practised be- 

 fore the Revolution, were no more a grant from Britain to us, than 



