ARGUMENT OF SIB WILLIAM BOBSOIT. 1723 



1042 If that question were put to any lawyer, or to any ordinary 

 person, who was not acquainted with all the controversy there 

 has been, what would he do? He would say : Well, let us look at the 

 treaty. He would turn to Article 1 of the treaty, and there he would 

 see that the right was only conferred upon " inhabitants of the United 

 States." He would then say: Well now, the treaty does not give the 

 inhabitants of the United States any right to bring on the ground 

 those who are not inhabitants of the United States; is there any other 

 ground than that of the treaty upon which such persons might be 

 brought within that territory ? That is, persons who are not inhabi- 

 tants of the United States. He would be informed at once both by 

 the United States and Great Britain, that outside the treaty no one 

 has a right to force himself into the jurisdiction of Great Britain 

 without Great Britain's leave no one ; and as no one has that right, 

 still less has an inhabitant of the United States the right to bring 

 foreigners in. I am going to deal with it only as a question as between 

 Great Britain and foreigners. I shall deal afterwards with the 

 collateral matter about inhabitants of Newfoundland. But, keep- 

 ing that aside for the moment because I want to meet the question 

 in its simplest form, in a form with all the fringe cut away from 

 it, with all the dust of controversy settled so that we may look at it 

 with clear and undisturbed eyes, can there be but one answer to the 

 question? The fundamental proposition which no lawyer here will 

 deny is that every nation has the right to exclude a]iens. Every 

 Government has the right to exclude aliens unless it has parted with 

 that by contract, and the contract, as we have seen, during the long 

 argument which has been going on here, must be, if it detaches sov- 

 ereign right, express, it must be written, and it must be fully stated 

 within the four corners of the written document. We need not 

 trouble about this because this Question No. 2 does not turn upon 

 that. The only question here is, where a nation has given to a par- 

 ticular class of aliens a right of entry, will anybody contend that it 

 has thereby parted with its right to exclude all aliens except the 

 special favoured class? There is only one answer to that. That is 

 not a matter or argument that is as far as I am going I am going 

 step by step. But, as far as I have got now, I say it is not an argu- 

 ment. I am not arguing here, I am merely laying down that which 

 nobody would ever dream of denying, that the very essence of all 

 nationality, of all sovereignty, is the right to preserve, as people 

 will say, inviolate, their own shores, keeping their shores from the 

 foot of the alien except in so far as they choose to admit him. There- 

 fore, nobody would contend that by any act extending this right 

 we in any way limited or diminished our rights in regard to the 

 exclusion of Frenchmen, Spaniards, or anybody you please. We may 



