ARGUMENT OF SIB WILLIAM BOBSON. 1719 



French were claiming an exclusive right. If they had known it they 

 had forgotten it. 



THE PRESIDENT: Had not the Americans recognised in the treaty 

 of 1778 that they had an exclusive right? 



SIE W. ROBSON: Yes, they had, but the two statements are not 

 very difficult to reconcile. Mr. Rush, who was writing this letter, 

 was negotiating in 1818. In 1778 a treaty had been made between 

 the United States and France, during the war, in which the United 

 States had recognised the right of France on the western shore as 

 exclusive, but Mr. Rush I am taking his own words says that it 

 was not present to his mind in 1818. I dare say that if any of us, 

 on behalf of our respective countries, sat down to make a treaty, we 

 might very well have forgotten treaties thirty or forty years old, 

 which had lapsed; because the treaty of 1778 had been denounced. 

 It was no longer an operative document, and therefore it would not 

 be the business of anyone to look it up and consider it among the 

 material documents in making the treaty of 1818. Let us say that 

 the declaration of the United States in the treaty of 1778 with regard 

 to exclusion had escaped recollection; so that, when the parties sat 

 down, in 1818, instead of providing against a repetition of what was 

 called the French danger or rather the French interpretation, they 

 did not know there had been any such interpretation and could 

 not therefore have been providing against that. That is the 

 1010 only observation to be made on Mr. Rush's letter, because, of 

 course, that the right was admitted as exclusive is apparently 

 clear, and Mr. Rush's statement is equally clear, and I am taking 

 Mr. Rush's own words. Of course, we must take it as that of a re- 

 sponsible and distinguished man, and we must conclude that he had 

 forgotten all about it when they negotiated this treaty. I think 

 that completes all the observations I have to make on Question 1. 



THE PRESIDENT: Had not the exclusiveness of the French right 

 been, in a certain manner, acknowledged also in the declaration of 

 the British King in 1783 ? 



SIR W. ROBSON : That, of course, is a question. We fought about 

 that for something like one hundred years. I am glad to say now 

 that it is taken out of the way of the law officers of the Crown. May 

 they pursue their way in peace without that question. It has alread}' 

 weighed upon them for over one hundred years. We said that we 

 had not made the right exclusive, but we will not wait to go into 

 that now. There was some ground for our contention, but, undoubt- 

 edly, the treaty with France with relation to that right was as many 

 treaties are. The parties were anxious to keep the peace, and they 

 were willing to leave a few difficulties for their descendants. The 

 French demanded the insertion of the word " exclusive " in the 

 treaty, and England refused to allow the word " exclusive " to be 



