ARGUMENT OF ELIHU BOOT. 1981 



I am not finding fault with Sir Robert Bond or with Newfoundland 

 for attempting to bring about a change in the bounty system or 

 in the protective duties of another country. I am urging upon you 

 that this is not the attitude of a judge, that that purpose which 

 has inspired the consistent policy of the Government of Newfound- 

 land for a quarter of a century, as Sir Robert Bond says, is wholly 

 inconsistent with what my honourable friends on the other side call 

 the fair regulation of our rights. I am saying that if there is no line 

 of demarcation set by this treaty grant upon our rights, but they are 

 left to the unrestrained judgment, the discretion, the legislative 

 authority of the Government of Newfoundland, our rights are gone; 

 and all this right, for which John Adams was willing to refuse peace, 

 for which John Quincy Adams threatened war to Bagot in 1816, 

 was an idle fantasy, a delusion, unprotected by the terms of the 

 instrument they were so insistent upon. 



Still further, what is the meaning of these laws about the employ- 

 ment of Newfoundland fishermen, about the shipment of Newfound- 

 land fishermen, or of any fishermen within the jurisdiction? What 

 is the meaning of the provisions of the Act of 1905 and 1906 ? They 

 do not relate to the purchase of bait. Here the two lines come to- 

 gether. They relate to the taking of fish. Let us, for the present, 

 assume that they were justified under some construction of the 

 treaty they would be justified let us assume that Newfoundland had 

 a perfect right to prohibit the shipment of any sailor, of any fisher- 

 man in a fishing crew within the territory of Newfoundland, let us 

 assume that they had a right to prohibit any British subject from 

 fishing from an American vessel within the territory of Newfound- 

 land, let us assume that they had a right to prohibit any Newfound- 

 lander to go outside of Newfoundland territory for the purpose 

 of shipping upon an American vessel why did they do it ? They did 

 it for no other purpose, or conceivable purpose, than to limit, restrict, 

 interfere with and prevent the successful prosecution of the Ameri- 

 can fishery. It was the spirit of competition, it was the determina- 

 tion to destroy a competitor's enterprise that dictated these laws. 

 Granted, if you please, that they had a perfectly legal right to make 

 those provisions, they exhibited the spirit which I am discussing, 

 and it was exhibited in their regulation of our fishery as well as in 

 the particular statute to which I refer. 



We are not without much evidence as to this spirit and purpose. 

 It was intense, it was controlling, it made the Government of New- 

 foundland willing to ignore the interests and wishes of their own 

 fishermen. It was not a fisherman's policy, but it was a trading policy 

 which was outcropping for the benefit of the great fishing and trading 

 firms of St. John's, and it was the same policy which led Great 

 Britain into the statutes which you have read, that endeavoured 



