ARGUMENT OF SIB WILLIAM BOBSON. 1687 



use the expression, because I cannot get their meaning very explicitly 

 stated. There was no doubt about it, because the historical part of 

 their Case showed that. They said they had a divided sovereignty. 

 I refer, for instance, to p. 9 of their Case. They say there that they 

 had equal rights as joint owners with Great Britain and the other 

 colonies. They say that the treat} 7 was merely a recognition of the 

 division of those joint rights, like two partners. There is no ques- 

 tion of superiority of status as between two partners when 

 1020 they divide the assets, and here, following the very phrase- 

 ology and the very metaphors adopted by Mr. Turner, they 

 say we simply divided the assets of a partnership. That was their 

 partition of empire theory. There is no question there of one being 

 servient to the other. Each of them took an original sovereign right 

 by reason of their antecedent right, and he says we treated that as a 

 division of the empire ; our independence was no more a grant from 

 Britain to us than the treaty was a grant from us of Canada, Nova 

 Scotia, and so on; it was nothing more than a mutual acknowledg- 

 ment of antecedent rights. 



Well, then they say the same on p. 13 [United States Case] : 



" Great Britain has admitted that when this treaty was made she 

 had no exclusive jurisdiction or right in such fisheries and that the 

 United States as an independent nation would have been equally 

 entitled to their use and enjoyment independently of any treaty 

 provisions." 



Then, I turn to the Argument, p. 26. The passage I have just read 

 appears to me a little more explicit and gets a little closer to what 

 Great Britain parted with, namely, the sovereign right which the 

 United States acquired. I quite agree with the construction that Mr. 

 Justice Gray has put upon that passage. Again, taken by itself, it is 

 possibly quite open to it, but when one has to choose between two 

 meanings that are possible, when one looks at the context, it is that 

 the printed Argument of the United States was indicating that the 

 right which the United States had acquired was more than a restric- 

 tion upon us; it was a conveyance to the United States of the full 

 exercise of the right with which we had parted. 



JUDGE GRAY : What you parted with was the right to fish, and if a 

 right in the fishery was a sovereign right, unquestionably you trans- 

 ferred some sovereignty. 



SIR W. ROBSON : If the United States were content with taking it 

 in that way, I would not mind. 



SIR CHARLES FITZPATRIOK: Did you part with the right to fish, or 

 convey the right to fish to some one else ? 



SIR W. ROBSON: No, we did not part with the right to fish; we 

 consented not to exercise our sovereign right of exclusion against them 

 for that purpose. 



