ARGUMENT OF SIR WILLIAM ROBSON. 1743 



now representing the Crown and giving it the benefit of such poor 

 legal advice as I am able to give, and I must submit the view which 

 seems to me to be correct. 



I must now pass to the argument on this question which I am 

 afraid I would have omitted but for the Tribunal directing my at- 

 tention to it, and that is, the statutes cited by Mr. Elder in reference 

 to, as he called it, the employment of foreigners. 



I think he did not get quite the true intent of those statutes. 



Of course England in 1818, as long previously, was a great mari- 

 time nation, with trade relations, even at that early date, in every 

 part of the known world, and although she was anxious that her own 

 citizens or natives should be trained in maritime pursuits, and to en- 

 courage the training of her own citizens in those pursuits, yet she 

 could never put upon her ship-owners such a disadvantage as it 

 would be to be able to employ only Englishmen, or only Britons. 

 That would have been a fatal, or at least a very dangerous disadvan- 

 tage to our ship-owners in trading in say the East Indies, especially 

 where we had, owing to the very hot climate, to employ lascars and 

 various Asiatic races who can stand better the heat of the engines 

 and the stoke-rooms in the Red Sea, and so on. We are obliged to 

 employ many foreigners upon our ships, and always, in different 

 parts of the world, the British ship-owner has been allowed to employ 

 some foreigners if he needed them. But, when our navigation laws 

 prevailed (laws which I am now happy to say have been abrogated 

 for the last forty or fifty years), they compelled our ship-owners to 

 employ a certain proportion of British subjects, not always only 

 British subjects, because then, as now, we differentiated a little. For 

 instance, sometimes special privileges were given to English sub- 

 jects as against Irish subjects. Here again one is referring to some 

 of our historic mistakes, but they are not now to be criticised, be- 

 cause, after all, we are only dealing with their effect upon the con- 

 struction of this treaty. 



Sometimes we would say a certain proportion of your crew must 

 be subjects of the King, and sometimes in other statutes we might say 

 they must be English, giving a special advantage to England, but 

 never, so far as I know, do we proceed so far as to say you shall not 

 employ foreigners in the great commerce of England. You could 

 not do it. You might find yourself in India or Asia with your crew 

 depleted by various reasons on those long voyages, scurvy or what 

 not, and you would be obliged to make up the complement of your 

 crew by employing anyone you could get, but that did not mean that 

 we encouraged the employment of foreigners. It did not even mean 

 that we permitted it. It only meant that we did not prohibit it. We 

 said to an Englishman, you must have three-fourths of your crew 

 English, we want to make sure that you shall have that, and always 



