ARGUMENT OF SIB WILLIAM BOBSON. 1725 



you that they must be inhabitants of the United States, and do you 

 say that you have not enough? Do you say that if you are not 

 allowed to take Norwegians, and Scandinavians, and Poles, and so 

 on, you cannot carry out your right at all? The United States is 

 not so entirely bereft of population as all that. 



T*here is another answer that they may make and do make. They 

 say it is very expensive to fetch inhabitants of the United States, 

 that they are more profitably employed, that they will not go and 

 face the dangers and discomforts of the deep. We say that is very 

 likely so ; but if the right given you attached only to your own inhab- 

 itants and was given for their personal benefit, as we find when we 

 come to read the documents, it does not enable you to go beyond 

 the terms of your treaty, and let every master of a fishing-smack 

 in the United States, assuming to exercise a sovereign right, say : " I, 

 Captain John Smith, am going to bring foreigners into the territory 

 of Great Britain; Great Britain has allowed me to come and, in 

 allowing me to come, it has allowed my vessel to come, and, in allow- 

 ing my vessel to come, it has allowed anybody I choose to put on my 

 vessel." And so the United States, by that free and obvious train 

 of reasoning, are apparently able to bring foreigners into a country 

 which desires to exclude them, and which has never given them 

 permission to enter. I do not want in the least to speak disrespect- 

 fully of the Question, but I really cannot conceive how, as a matter 

 of international law^, it would be possible for this Tribunal to say 

 affirmatively that the inhabitants of the United States, while exer- 

 cising the liberties, have a right to employ foreigners. 



They think that because we have given them the right to enter, 

 they, without a word of express language in their favour, have the 

 right to extend the treaty privilege to persons who are forbidden by 

 our law to enter. When this treaty was made in 1818 the law was 

 very jealous indeed of Newfoundland. It was not so much like a 

 country as like a fruitful field or garden where it was a privilege to 

 be permitted to enter and take the produce of the earth. The framers 

 of the treaty said : " You draw our attention to the fact " and they 

 drew it very pathetically in the eloquent letter of Mr. Adams " that 

 under the old arrangement between us, when we were all members of 

 one Empire, some of your fishermen on the coast of Massachusetts 

 had been earning a living in the Bank fisheries. They had not been 

 earning it in the inshore fisheries at all." And that is a consideration 

 worth bearing in mind when we come to deal with attempts to enlarge 

 this right. They had been earning a living upon the Banks, and it 

 was pointed out that it would be a great hardship on them if the 

 change of their nationality were to bring about a loss of their liveli- 

 hood; and that was a contention put on grounds of humanity. It 

 was not put on grounds of partition of empire or division of sover- 



