1692 NORTH ATLANTIC COAST FISHERIES ARBITRATION. 



lating our own fishermen and other people's fishermen as we chose, 

 but we have limited the exercise of our sovereign rights to the extent 

 of promising that we will only regulate so as not to interrupt and 

 impair the legitimate exercise of the right, whatever it is, that we 

 have given. The question is: What is the right that we gave, and 

 I think 1 have shown by the negotiations of the parties, by the con- 

 tract itself and by the conduct of the parties after the contract and 

 in relation to the contract, that the right given was the right to a 

 regulated fishery and nothing else. 



I have finished what I have to say as to custom. Now I would 

 draw the attention of the Tribunal, and that very briefly, to the want 

 of accord or unanimity between the different writers in relation to 

 this concept of a servitude. I do not wonder that we should have a 

 want of accord. It is extremely difficult for writers on international 

 law to generalise and to collect principles from a number of treaties 

 which are totally independent contracts, which are contracts made by 

 laymen in reference to the particular necessities of the situation of 

 the two contracting parties. They are not thinking about general 

 principles. Each is deciding what it wants and how much it can get 

 and they contract accordingly. It is not an easy task for the jurists 

 to try and collect a general principle from the mass of individual, 

 varying contracts. We could not expect very much accord, but we 

 should expect accord if it is international law which is entitled to 

 impose itself upon contracts. Then we should say, at all events, if it 

 has got to the extent that it is a doctrine standing as a part of the 

 international law, so that it is imposed upon a contract where not 

 expressed, that we do expect it to be clear, certain and well defined. 

 But. it obviously has no such characteristic and it would not be ac- 

 cepted if it had not become a part of international law. Jurists are 

 speculating about it, they are only trying to introduce a little system, 

 a new branch of international law, which is separate, detached, I 

 might almost call it incoherent, because it depends upon a number of 

 individual contracts from which no general principle can be col- 

 lected. 



For instance, Mr. Turner says that it will be difficult to get or 

 expect harmony with reference to the extremely difficult conception 

 of servitudes, that such harmony has not been found among writers 

 and never will be found. I should have expected to have had him 

 asserting that the writers were perfectly harmonious, absolutely 

 clear and that nobody had any doubt about it, even going so far as to 

 say that it was international law applicable to this present case. But, 

 he does not say that. 



Yet that is the doctrine which Mr. Turner himself describes as the 

 doctrine which he claims to have been well settled and universally 

 known in 1818, when these parties were acting upon it. or must have 



