1834 NORTH ATLANTIC COAST FISHERIES ARBITRATION. 



Of course the United States did at one time take up the contention 

 that the word was there unnecessarily, that there was no occasion 

 for it, that it was there merely as descriptive of parts of coast, hut 

 not as having any special significance, not as filling or performing 

 any special vocation, just put. as lawyers do sometimes put words, 

 descriptively, rather than in view of their having any particular or 

 important meaning. That was the position at one time that the 

 United States took up, but they abandoned that. They took it up 

 as far back as 1845, when Mr. Everett, I think, put it forward, ami 

 then, in answer to a letter from Lord Aberdeen (I am not going into 

 the references now, because you are quite familiar with them). Mr. 

 Everett abandoned the contention that " bays " meant nothing, and 

 he admitted that, after all, the 3-mile line must be drawn around the 

 coast in a way which should enable the nation owning the adjacent 

 territory to claim its own bays, irrespective of the precise measure- 

 ment between the headlands. The same contention that bays 

 1109 meant nothing came up again in the United States Case, but 

 always, whenever the United States has adopted that view, it 

 has found the difficulty of maintaining it rather greater than it 

 anticipated and has abandoned it. And now the United States in 

 their Argument have put forward the contention that the word 

 " bays " did mean something. That it meant a particular kind of 

 bay. They are not very clear yet exactly as to what meaning they 

 will finally adopt, because we had in the course of this argument, 

 in this room, a little wavering between two quite distinct views of 

 the word "bays." 



On the one hand, we have Great Britain coming here thinking 

 that the United States were going to contend on their argument, on 

 their printed Argument, that a "bay" or "bays" of the kind that 

 were renounced meant " bays " 6 miles or less at their entrance, no 

 matter what their interior dimensions might be. 



Then Mr. Warren had difficulties about that view, which he 

 thought perhaps were not easily met, and so he developed in hi- 

 speech a theory of "bays" which was not in the correspondence, nor 

 in the written Counter-Case or Argument, but which \va-. according 

 to him, that you followed the indentations of the coast until coiniiii,' 

 along those indentations where they narrowed you came to a pom' 

 where you could get 6 miles across, and that you made a bay a bay 

 within a bay. 



Well, now, all those contentions of the United States for the 

 moment I lay aside; they are not the su<_ r Lr<'stion with which I am 

 about to deal. The suggestion with which I am about to deal is time 

 the word "bay" is superfluous, that it has no meaning of any value 

 in this controversy at all, that all that was meant when you speak of 

 "coasts" and "bays" is "coasts." You follow the line of coast 



