No. 4.] tup: harvest of the sea. ui 



unconstitutional, as it interfered witli State rights. It was 

 claimed that the United States had no jurisdiction in what 

 is called "territorial waters;" that is, within three miles 

 of the shore of any State. 



As I am not a lawyer, I will not presume to offer any 

 opinion ; but if we go into the history of the formation of 

 this government, and in fact before the government was 

 formed, we shall find that the fisheries were considered a 

 part of the commerce of the country, and that the preserva- 

 tion of the rights of the people of all the United Colonies in 

 the sea fisheries was commonly put forward as one of the 

 chief objects and sometimes the principal object to be obtained 

 by the formation of the Federal Union. In 1782, when John- 

 Adams and Benjamin Franklin were in Paris negotiating 

 the terms of the treaty of peace, it was made the sine qua 

 non of the negotiation that the rights of the people of the 

 Colonies in the sea fisheries should be preserved to them. 



Again, in the debates in the convention that created the 

 Federal Constitution, the fisheries were considered an im- 

 })ortant l)ranch of our commercial interests, which the Con- 

 stitution was expected to preserve and to regulate. Mr. 

 Hamilton, in "The Federalist," wrote, "The fisheries are 

 the rights of the Union, and a matter of great moment." 

 Gouverneur ]Morris said, "The fisheries and the Mississippi 

 are the great objects of this Union." The brilliant Fisher 

 Ames stated : " The taking of fish is a very momentous con- 

 cern. It forms a nursery for seamen, and this will l)e the 

 source from which we are to derive maritime importance ; " 

 and Ell^ridge Gerry emphasized the same point. 



Legal lights of our own day affirm the same opinion. Mr. 

 Dana, counsel for the United States in the Fishery Awards 

 Commission at Halifax, said that he would stake his profes- 

 sional reputation, or rather his reputation as a man knowing 

 anything whatever about international law, upon the propo- 

 sition that a fisherman or mariner pursuing fish upon the high 

 seas, up to the low- water mark, upon the coast of any coun- 

 try, was not a trespasser.* 



Saj's Mr. Joseph H. Choate, in the case of Manchester v. 



* From the argument of Mr. Joseph H. Choate, in the case of Manchester v. the 

 Commonwealth of Massachusetts, before the United States Supreme Court. 



