1638 NORTH ATLANTIC COAST FISHERIES ARBITRATION. 



Mr. Adams said the word " right " is properly used with regard to 

 the fishing in the high seas. Great Britain had been claiming juris- 

 diction over the high seas. It is a claim which I am glad to say was 

 dropped when we come to the treaty of 1818. But she had been 

 claiming the dominion, not only over this, that, or the other sea, but 

 over all seas. 



I need not justify the conduct of Great Britain now, because the 

 Tribunal well knows the great struggle in which she was then en- 

 gaged, a struggle which has been described by an American historian 

 of genius, Captain Mahan, as the battle between the land and the sea. 

 Napoleon had said he would conquer the sea by the land, and he 

 issued the decr.ee forbidding any English ship to touch at any Euro- 

 pean port. Pitt had answered by the Orders-in-Council forbidding 

 any neutral ship to touch at any European port until it had first 

 discharged some part of its cargo at a British port. Of course, as 

 things go now, it was a hopeless pretension, and brought about a 

 great war, the war of 1812 most unfortunately; it was a contention 

 that could not be maintained. But, still, now that one hundred years 

 or so have elapsed, one is not inclined to weigh very much in that 

 titanic struggle between these two great Powers of France and 

 Great Britain. It was a question of who was to have dominion of 

 the sea. America, then a young Power, and not. of course, a great 

 naval Power, found herself crushed in the conflict I will not say 

 crushed, but attacked and injured in the conflict between these two 

 Powers, each fighting for what it believed to be essential to its- 

 existence. France fighting for Empire; England fighting, as she 

 believed, for existence, because there is no doubt whatever that if we 

 had for one day lost the command of the sea in the great Napoleonic 

 wars, we would have lost our liberty as a nation, and the British 

 Empire would have ceased to exist. 



Under those circumstances one must not look very critically or 

 censoriously at the unfortunate acts, and sometimes the ill-judged 

 acts, to which an English Government, fighting for its life, was 

 driven, and it asserted immense pretensions, no doubt, over the hiirli 

 seas, pretentions to which America very justifiably and very properly 

 refused assent. 



Well, it made, however, a step in advance, a useful step in advance, 

 in 1783, when it acknowledged the right of the United States to fish 

 in the high seas; and, there it was treated as a right, and as a 

 " right " only. It said the people of the United States shall con- 

 tinue to enjoy unmolested the "right" to take fish of every kind 

 on the Grand Banks, and all other banks of Newfoundland. 

 991 also in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and at all other places in 

 the sea (that meant in the high sea) where the inhabitants 

 of both countries used at any time heretofore to fish. 



