AWARD OF THE FISHERY COMMISSION. 1651 



hit ions of the two countries on this question have been steadily improv- 

 ing. We have passed from the jealous and restrictive policy of the 

 Convention of 1818 to the free and liberal system of the Treaty of 1854, 

 and, with good sense and good temper, it is impossible that we should 

 ever go backward. The old feuds and bitternesses that sprang from the 

 Revolution have long since died out between the two great nations, and 

 in fact, for Great Britain, the original party in these negotiations, has 

 been substituted a nation of neighbors and kinsmen, a nation working 

 with us in the wise and prosperous government of this vast continent, 

 which is our joint possession ; a nation, I may add, without presump- 

 tion or offense, whose existence and whose growth is one of the direct 

 consequences of our own creation, and whose future prosperity is bound 

 up with our own. In the Treaty of 1871 we have reached a settlement 

 which it depends upon your decision to make the foundation of a firm 

 and lasting union. Putting aside for the moment the technical plead- 

 ings and testimony, what is the complaint and claim of the Dominion f 

 It is that where they have made of the fishery a common property, 

 opened what they consider a valuable industry to the free use of both 

 countries, they are not met in the same spirit, and other industries, to 

 them of equal or greater value, are not opened by us with the same 

 friendly liberality. I can find no answer to this complaint, no reply to 

 this demand, but that furnished by the British Case, your own claim to 

 receive a money compensation in the place of what you think we ought 

 to have given. If a money compensation is recompense if these un- 

 equal advantages, as you call them, can be equalized by a money pay- 

 ment, carefully, closely, but adequately estimated then we have bought 

 the right to the inshore fisheries, and we can do what we will with our 

 own. Then we owe no obligation to liberality of sentiment or commu- 

 nity of interest ; then we are bound to no moderation in the use of our 

 privilege, and if purse-seining and trawling and gurry-poison and eager 

 competition destroy your fishing, as you say they will, we have paid the 

 damages beforehand; and when at the end of twelve years we count 

 the cost, and find that we have paid exorbitantly for that which was 

 profitless, do you think we will be ready to renew the trade, and where 

 and how will we recover the loss? 



Ho. I believe that this treaty as it stands executed to-day, interpreted 

 in the broad and liberal spirit in which it was conceived, is, whether you 

 regard the interests of the maritime provinces or the wider interests of 

 the whole Dominion, a greater advantage in the present and a larger 

 promise in the future than any money-award which may belittle the 

 large liberality of its provisions. As it stands it means certain progress. 

 The thorough investigation which these interests have now for the first 

 time received, a few years, a few months of kindly feeling and common 

 interest will supply all its deficiencies and correct all its imperfections. 



And, therefore, do I most sincerely hope that your decision will leave 

 it so, free to do its own good work, and then we who have striven to- 

 gether, not, I am glad to say, either unkindly or ungenerously, to reach 

 some just conclusion, will find in the future which that treaty contains 

 the wisest solution, and we shall live to see all possible differences which 

 may have disturbed the natural relations of the two countries, not re- 

 motely but in the to-morrow of living history, not metaphorically but 

 literally, "in the deep bosom of the ocean buried." 



