ARGUMENT OF SAMUEL J. ELDER. 1445 



ing, that he preferred the furrowed front of war. Everything was 

 peace between the two. And so with our great neighbour and 

 873 friend on the north. The times were those of perfect peace, 

 and had been for many years. We were proud of the enormous 

 advancement they were making. We looked askance a little at the 

 tens of thousands of our people who were going across the border to 

 help them build up that great northern Empire. But there was only 

 a feeling of generous rivalry, and in regard to the whole of the 

 fishery question, from 1888 on there had been absolute peace, under 

 a simple system of licenses. 



And as to Newfoundland, we were in absolute peace with their peo- 

 ple. They were our co-labourers in the same field. Tens of thousands 

 of the dollars of the United States went every year to the people of 

 Newfoundland. They worked with us and we with them. They were 

 our friends. How was it, then, that an arbitration, so formal and 

 so important as this, should have become necessary? 



I think I am not under-stating it. or over-stating it, whichever it 

 may be, when I say that it was due to one man, and one man alone, 

 that this present arbitration at least at this time became necessary. 

 That man was the Premier of Newfoundland. He had sought dili- 

 gently and earnestly to bring about a reciprocity treaty between his 

 country and ours. There had been an agreement in 1891 which, as 

 will later appear, Canada had prevented from being accepted. There 

 had been another agreement in 1902 the Bond-Hay Treaty, as I 

 think he commonly called it; we commonly speak of it as the Hay- 

 Bond Treaty and that remained in abeyance. It was, as he said, 

 held up in the Senate of the United States for a couple of years. 

 And then trouble began. 



In 1904, while this matter was still pending before the United 

 States Senate, a fishing- vessel of the United States, just as the ice 

 was closing in, left the Bay of Islands without a clearance. She 

 went down to Wood Island, which is at the mouth of the Bay of 

 Islands, expecting to find a revenue cutter there, to get a clearance. 

 Failing to find it, she, under orders from her owners not to get 

 caught in the ice, as the captain had once before done, sailed away 

 for Gloucester, and on his return he was haled before the courts 

 and fined 200 dollars. That was one of the first, perhaps the first 

 instance, in which United States vessels had ever been proceeded 

 against on the Treaty Coast. But that was far from being the end 

 of the story. 



In 1905, in April, there was brought in the Foreign Fishing Vessels 

 Act of that year, by this Premier. I shall go at some length into that, 

 but need not do more than mention it now. I need not attempt to 

 prove that it was not intended solely in the interest of the fisheries, 

 because the distinguished representative of Newfoundland, Sir James 



