1632 NORTH ATLANTIC COAST FISHERIES ARBITRATION. 



to make it good." There is no suggestion here that they had an 

 original sovereignty, or that they had any higher right, independent 

 of grant. That never entered their heads, because they said : " Like 

 every other grantor, if you purport to have given something which 

 you did not possess you must provide compensation. If the grantee 

 is disappointed in what you had led him to think he was going to 

 get, you must provide compensation." And they claimed compensa- 

 tion from Great Britain clearly asserting not an original sover- 

 eignty, but a limited liberty, subject to a local law. If they had 

 had an original sovereignty they would have said : " We do not 

 trouble about Great Britain. We are here; we are entitled to go to 

 these waters and enforce our rights against Great Britain if need be, 

 but certainly against France." They would have said it, and I 

 think those heroes of the Revolution would probably have done it, 

 if they had thought they had a good cause, because they were 

 courageous, and a combative race- -like the race from which they 

 sprang. 



Just another quotation, which is almost a page further on, p. 108, 

 and a very useful one to bear in mind. Mr. Adams, in his letter to 

 Mr. Rush, towards the end of the first long paragraph, says: 



"The deliberate pretension to exercise force within purely British 

 waters was unexpected on the part of France." 



987 I do not need to go into the historic incidents with which 

 this incident was connected. I am simply drawing attention 

 to the manner in which he describes our waters which are subject to 

 the French liberty. He says they are " purely British." And now I 

 wish to refer to a most significant phrase, which sums up the whole 

 of the case on this point, used by Mr. Rush. I read from p. 110 of 

 the British Case Appendix, a sentence or two down from the begin- 

 ning of the third paragraph : 



"That it can never be presumed that she intended so far to re- 

 nounce, or in any wise to diminish this sovereignty as to exclude her 

 own subjects from any part of the coast. That no positive grant to 

 this effect is to be found in the treaty, and that the claim or France 

 to an exclusive right, a claim so repugnant to the sovereign rights of 

 Great Britain, can rest on nothing less strong than a positive grant." 



It is in the paragraph after that that the words occur on which I 

 lay such stress. It is in the second sentence : 



" It is obvious that if Great Britain cannot make good the title 

 which the United States hold under her to take fish on the western 

 coast of Newfoundland, it will rest with her to indemnify them for 

 the loss." 



Those words: "under her" are words of the first importance in such 

 a controversy as this. They dispose, really, of both branches of the 

 United States argument. They dispose of the historic branch, if that 



