2150 NORTH ATLANTIC COAST FISHERIES ARBITRATION. 



THE PRESIDENT: It would certainly express your idea in a clearer 

 way, I should think. 



SENATOR ROOT: That would probably result from the fact that the 

 style of the President of the Tribunal is superior. 



THE PRESIDENT : I make no pretensions at all as to style. 



SENATOR ROOT: Whatever inference is to be drawn here, there is no 

 dispute and I take it there can be none that the bays, harbours 

 and creeks referred to were within the territorial limits of (ireat 

 Britain, and were not something additional to those territorial 

 limits. As I said a few minutes ago, in answer to a question, if we 

 can ascertain what those territorial limits are, we have an infallible 

 guide to show us what bays, harbours and creeks were referred to. 



The first proposition which I wish to make in the effort to as- 

 certain what the negotiators understood these limits to be, for, after 

 all, that is the great question we are not so much concerned about 

 what some arguments might have established them to be as with what 

 the makers of the treaty considered them to be is that there is now, 

 there was then, and there always has been, ever since the old vague 

 claims to great areas of the sea were dispelled and abandoned, a rule, 

 which is a rule of common sense, almost of necessity, that if any na- 

 tion wishes to extend its jurisdiction over a bit of water extending 

 beyond the limit of its accepted and accorded territorial zone, it 

 must claim it. It must assert its right. There was not in 1818, and 

 there is not now, any rule of law or any custom of nations under 

 which the large bodies of water indenting the coast of a country are 

 regarded as being within the jurisdiction of the country unless the 

 country asserts her jurisdiction over them, unless the country claims 

 them. 



The general rule of law accords to every country a territorial zone 

 over which it has rights of sovereignty based upon the necessity and 

 the reasonableness of protection. The most general view is that the 

 reasonable width of such a zone is 3 miles. Some countries take a 

 different view, Norway, I think, claiming 4 miles. In the 

 1300 treaty of 1806, to which I shall have to refer again presently, 

 Great Britain and the United States agreed upon 3 miles as 

 the width of such a zone as all the world was bound to recognise, 

 and upon 5 miles that they would recognise as between themselves 

 for the peculiar and special circumstances treated of in that treaty. 

 The Institute of Internationa] Law. at its meeting in 1894. expressed 

 the view that 6 miles would be reasonable. But the width is im- 

 material to my present argument. Whatever it be. the world accords 

 to every country, as a matter of course, and without its making any 

 assertion of it, or claim to it. a right of sovereignty over the strip 

 of water which surrounds its coast. It was originally fixed by the 

 distance of cannon-shot, and, of course, fixed by measurement from 



