ARGUMENT OF SIR WILLIAM ROBSON. 1859 



SIR W. ROBSON: Yes; geographical situation and character 



" the corner stone of our claim is, that the United States are proprie- 

 tors of the lands on both sides " 



That is the corner-stone. 



SIR CHARLES FITZPATRICK : He repudiates the suggestion of de- 

 fensibility in the preceding paragraph, if you will notice. 



SIR TV. ROBSON : Yes. Because the question was the status of this 

 bay at the time of the seizure. That is the question before any ac- 

 quiescence was possible or not. 



I do not read the Attorney-General's opinion because it has been 

 read so often, and its general sense is, of course, present to our minds. 



Well, now, may I just follow it up by another reference? I think 

 it is very near the same page yes, on p. 57: Mr. Jefferson (United 

 States Secretary of State) to Mr. Hammond (British Minister at 

 Philadelphia) : 



" For the jurisdiction of the rivers and bays of the United States 

 the laws of the several States are understood to have made provision, 

 and they are moreover as being land locked, within the body of the 

 United States." 



Now what does that mean? Really that sentence alone ought to 

 carry me home. He is speaking there of bays so as to include Dela- 

 ware and Chesapeake; he calls them landlocked. He does not mean 

 that they were 6-mile bays. When he was writing in 1793 nobody 

 had ever thought of the C-mile bay; there was no mention of it by 

 anybody anywhere. What he means is: "Those bays are our prop- 

 erty because our land is on both sides of them ; and if they are our 

 property we have a right to do as we like with the fishery." And 

 the State of Delaware actually did monopolise the fishery, and for- 

 bade anyone even their fellow-countrymen, I believe to fish within 

 the bay. 



So that when the United States asked for bays from us, they meant 

 such bays as they claimed for themselves in their own territory. 

 And that meant all geographical bays with every right that juris- 

 diction carries with it. including the right to give a fishery or the 

 right to withhold a fishery. How then can it be said that the word 

 " bays " was a useless word ? Would it be fair to the meaning of 

 the parties to treat it as a superfluous word thrown in from the legal 

 instinct or habit of verbosity ? 



I quite agree that you may have a great many words, as I have 

 already said, which are of very little use in a document, and which 

 you may very fairly ignore. But can you do so where the result to 

 the parties is so vital? Can you throw out the word "bays'" in view 

 of the way in which each of the parties was treating it? On this 

 very page as my friend Sir Robert Finlay points out they are 



