ARGUMENT OF SIR WILLIAM EOBSON. 1663 



in diplomatic circles, and they therefore took care to keep themselves 

 straight. Colombia wanted no arbitration upon this question 

 apparently. 



We asked Mr. Turner : what is a servitude ? and Mr. Turner cer- 

 tainly did not shrink from that question. He defined a servitude, 

 and he defined a servitude as things very often are defined by those 

 who are going to use the definition for a particular purpose, in order 

 to extract from his definition what he wanted he very properly put 

 it there first and then proceeded to draw, by easy, simple, and logical 

 processes, the necessary deductions. Starting, for instance, with 

 reference to this right of fishing, obviously, the United States 

 thought: What sort of a definition do we want to get for this right 

 of fishing? And so the} 7 choose their definition. I do not find it 

 in the authorities that are cited ; it may be there for the very indus- 

 trious who may pick it out by fragments, but it is not there in very 

 explicit form. What is it ? It gives to the servitude three features 

 or characteristics. First, he says, it must belong to a nation. I 

 should say something about that. It does not belong to a nation 

 merely because a nation is a party to a contract which confers a right 

 upon particular individuals. That does not give a nation property 

 in the thing being dealt with. The next requisite is that it must 

 be permanent. I think that part of the definition must have been 

 laid down without full consideration of the ultimate purpose to 

 which the definition was to be applied, because this right is not 

 permanent as to the whole of it, and I do not know, I am sure, how 

 it can be said that one part of a right is to be severed from the other 

 and belongs to a totally different class of obligations, because the 

 right to dry and cure is not permanent. It is dependent upon the 

 continued unsettlement of the places where drying and curing may 

 be carried on. It would therefore be classed as a temporary right. 

 Then, third, it must make one territory serve the uses of another. 

 That was very necessary to the definition when Mr. Turner started 

 out, but he could not keep it up throughout the whole of his very 

 long and erudite speech. It went, it disappeared, because ultimately 

 he found he could not keep to the territories of the United States, 

 which had been convenient for the purposes of his argument at the 

 beginning. He began with the territory of the United States as the 

 prcedium dominans, but he had to let that go and he had to put in 

 its place, not the territory of the United States, but the sovereignty 

 of the United States, so that, later on, the predial element disappears. 

 It will be very useful to observe how it did go. I am not quite 

 sure whether I have in their place the references, but I am sure 

 I will come across them at some later stage in my note. But I say 

 that when one takes the definition that is put into these three propo- 

 sitions, as the United States have put them, it will be seen that 



