2132 NORTH ATLANTIC COAST FISHERIES ARBITRATION. 



Wolff, Wilson and Tucker, Holtzendorff, Merignhac, Olivart, Oppen- 

 heim and Pradier-Fodere. 



Now, they support us, they have reached the same conclusions we 

 have, and they testify that the nations, whose consent makes inter- 

 national law, have accepted the conclusion, however reached, by 

 whatever process of reasoning, the conclusion that such a right as 

 this is a thing by itself, and, from the necessity of its existence, 

 independent of the kind of control which Great Britain claims to 

 read into this treaty as a matter of implication. 



And I submit that our reasoning cannot be rejected without at the 

 same time rejecting the general opinion of the world of inter- 

 national law. 



1289 I should modify that it is not our reasoning, but our con- 

 clusion that cannot be rejected, without respecting the opinion 

 of the world of international law which has reached that same con- 

 clusion, by various routes and on various grounds, but all coming to 

 the same conclusion, accepted and confirmed by usage. 



These very rights regarding which we have been arguing (the 

 French and American fishing rights on the Newfoundland coast) 

 have generally been regarded, have been specified, as examples of the 

 class of right standing by itself, protected from the exercise of the 

 sovereign power of the burdened State, and that use of them as 

 examples is found in Bonfils, Chretien, Clauss, Despagnet, Diena, 

 Fabre, Hollatz, Holtzendorff, Merignhac, Olivart, Oppenheim, 

 Rivier, Ullmann, Wharton, and some others, I dare say, but those I 

 have noted. 



Now, if it is possible for anyone to support argument by authority, 

 if it is possible for anyone to give dignity and consideration to the 

 process of his own reasoning, by showing that others have reached the 

 same conclusion, we certainly have given substance, and weight, and 

 authority to the conclusion which we have been deducing here from 

 the record and from the nature of this grant. 



There is one matter to which I must call attention before leaving 

 this subject. Counsel for Great Britain have cited a number of de- 

 cisions in the United States in regard to the exercise of rights of fish- 

 ing by the people of one State in the territory of another, and some 

 cases in the British colonies. I shall not detain you by any extended 

 consideration of those cases. In the British colonies they wero a 

 matter of the internal polity of the British Empire. All these laws 

 had to receive the approval of the Sovereign, they became laws by 

 the authority of the sovereign law, and present purely a matter of 

 internal polity. These laws, statutes, and cases in the United States 

 also are entirely a matter of internal polity, the internal distribution 

 of power within our own country, and can have no relation whatever 

 to an international question of this description. 



