ARGUMENT OF SIR WILLIAM ROBSON. 1657 



rided. Nobody would suggest for a moment that such an obligation 

 as that fails to carry with it all the laws which will attach to the 

 exercise of local jurisdiction. 



Then take another example, the right to build a railway. Amid 

 all the complex relations of States you may have one State (it may be 

 a great one or it may be a little one) becoming entitled to assist its 

 own industrial interest by extending one of its State railways 

 through an adjacent territory. It would ask and obtain the right to 

 extend its railway, and it would be given to it, not merely to its 

 inhabitants, but to its Government, a stronger case than the present. 

 The Government would be entitled to continue the building of the 

 line, but when it comes into foreign territory does anyone suggest 

 that it is in a different position to the ship-owner whom I have just 

 mentioned, who sends his vessel to a foreign port? 



Yet here we find that there is a difference set up. In the case of a 

 State building railways or warehouses in a foreign territory, the Gov- 

 ernment is said to have a right totally different in character to that 

 of the ship-owner. In this case, though not in the case of the ship- 

 owner or the commercial traveller, these serious consequences in re- 

 gard to sovereignty are said to attach to the privilege granted. Why 

 this distinction ? It is not a distinction which has any right or foun- 

 dation in the reason of the thing. There is no practical reason, there 

 is no logical reason, why you should say to the possessor of the first 

 right, namely, the right to enter harbours : You must obey the local 

 jurisdiction, and you should say to the possessor of the second right, 

 the right-to build a railway or a warehouse, you are exempt from the 

 local jurisdiction; no sort of reason in the nature of the thing none 

 whatever. 



Is there any other ground of distinction? There is no reason for 

 that distinction in the contract none. You look at the contract itself 

 and you do not find there anything which indicates that the right to 

 fish should be treated as anything different, or the right to come and 

 fish, which is the better way of putting it, should be treated as in any 

 way a different right to the right to come and discharge a cargo, or 

 load a cargo, or enter the heart of the territory and trade. So that 

 the contract gives you no ground for any such distinction. If there 

 is none in the nature of the thing, and none in the contract between 

 the parties, is there any ground for implying that the parties in- 

 tended it, though they failed to express it ? 



"What reason is there for any such implication as that, an implica- 

 tion of such a portentous character, left unobserved, left to inference 

 implication, or mere speculation ? That is the position to which 

 1002 the United States are driven. They say : We seek here to im- 

 ply that which the parties never agreed to. It is to be implied 

 as a matter of alleged law. The parties not only never agreed to it, 

 92909 S. Doc. 870, 61-5, vol 11 6 



