ARGUMENT OF SIR WILLIAM ROBSON. 1615 



and said : "We have, by the statute of 1692, a right to fish as colonists 

 and that statute gave us the right of co-sovereigns; it is a right, 

 which, if we are to enjoy it at all, we can only enjoy free of your 

 regulation ; we do not trust you. They might have foreseen some Sir 

 Robert Bond of the future and they might have said: We will not 

 trust our rights to your regulation, and therefore, we claim con- 

 dominium with you in your sea-board. Massachusetts would, of 

 course, have resented it. No colony would have laid such a claim 

 to any other colony, and yet the United States are seeking now to 

 subject those who were once their fellow-colonists to this servitude 

 by reason of the old colonial relation ; that is so far as they are de- 

 pending and relying upon the historical part of their case. When one 

 comes to state it, it really disposes of the United States argument 

 altogether. Can it be founded on history or can it be founded, as 

 alleged, upon international law? 



I come now to the question of regulation subsequent to 1783, and. 

 of course, the importance of that is obvious, because it is not merely 

 an admission on the part of the United States, but it is a construction 

 put upon the contract of 1783 by the parties to that contract. If, 

 after the treaty was made, conferring this right upon the United 

 States, the parties deliberately adopted and applied the same con- 

 struction that would, according to common law certainly in an 

 international tribunal, which is less bound than municipal tribunals 

 by technical considerations, but even with respect to municipal law 

 be treated as binding. Both parties construed the right under the 

 treaty of 1783 in the same way as being a right subject to local regu- 

 lation. Therefore, the question as to whether there were regulations 

 or not is of great importance. It is one of the issues of fact in the 

 case which might quite easily be isolated from other arguments and 



issues of fact and be treated as deciding this case one way 

 977 or the other. Were there regulations after 1783 at all? Well, 



nobody, except lawyers, knows what can be contradicted. We, 

 standing here, are not ordinary persons at all, but an ordinary person 

 would say : Well, surely, you are not going to argue about that. Are 

 your statute books still in existence, are you guided by them, can 

 you read them ? because all you have to do is to turn them up from 

 1783 onwards until 1812 and see whether there are any regulations. 

 My friend, Sir Robert Finlay, gave us any amount. He read one 

 after the other, and I do not want to go through them again, and 

 there will be no suggestion that I should go through them again with 

 the same particularity as he. I shall deal with them very generally 

 indeed. But how did Mr. Turner meet them? We had to wait until 

 we heard Mr. Turner, because the United States indicated that this 

 was a question of fact best dealt with orally, and that it would be 



