APPENDICES TO OEAL AEGUMENTS. 2281 



The occasion for this correspondence with the British Govern- 

 ment arises from the great importance of reaching a complete and 

 explicit understanding between the two Governments, as to the con- 

 formity of the award made by the commission to the terms of the 

 Treaty of Washington by which its authority and jurisdiction are 

 communicated and defined. If the award in respect to the fisheries 

 had relation only to the sum of the payment involved, considerable 

 as that is, the Government might prefer to waive any discussion 

 which could affect no continuing and permanent interests of the two 

 countries, and would, therefore, comprehend only such considerations 

 as would touch the principles or elements of computation applied by 

 the commission in arriving at a pecuniary amount, the payment of 

 which carried no consequences. It is true, even in such case^ the 

 indisputable right of the parties to an arbitration public or private, 

 to examine an award in respect of its covering only the very matter 

 submitted, should not be too readily relinquished from mere repug- 

 nance to question, a result which, at least, if undisturbed, serves the 

 good purpose of closing the controversy. If the benevolent method 

 of arbitration between nations is to commend itself as a discreet and 

 practical disposition of international disputes, it must be by a due 

 maintenance of the safety and integrity of the transaction in the 

 essential point of the award, observing the limits of the submission. 



But this Government is not at liberty to treat the Fisheries Award 

 as of this limited interest and operation in the relations of the two 

 countries to the important, permanent, and difficult contention on 

 the subject of the fisheries, which for sixty years has, at intervals, 

 pressed itself upon the attention of the two Governments, and dis- 

 quieted their people. The temporary arrangement of the fisheries 

 by the Treaty of Washington is terminable, at the pleasure of either 

 party, in less than seven years from now. The Fisheries Award, 

 upon such termination of the treaty arrangements, will have ex- 

 hausted its force as compensation tor a supposed equivalent and 

 terminated privilege. If the Government, by silent payment of the 

 award, should seem to have recognised the principles upon which 

 it proceeds, as they may then be assumed or asserted by Her 

 Majesty's Government, it will at once have prejudiced its own rights, 

 when it shall become necessary to insist upon them, and seem to have 

 concealed or dissembled its objections to the award when Great 

 Britain was entitled to an immediate and open avowal of them. 



Upon these considerations the President and Congress have re- 

 quired that the sentiments of this Government respecting the Fish- 

 eries Award should be set before Her Majesty's Government, to the 

 end that a full interchange of views, in a friendly spirit, between 

 the two Governments, should leave no uncertainty as to the degree 

 of concurrence or of difference in their respective estimates of this 

 transaction. 



It is greatly to be regretted that the protocols of the commission 

 make no record of the steps by which the majority reached the con- 

 clusion which they announced as the award of the commission, and 

 the dissenting Commissioner, on the other hand, arrived at so widely 

 different a result. Had the record disclosed the methods of reasoning 

 on the processes of calculation respecting either of the privileges 

 92909 VOL 1213 4 



