1652 AWARD OF THE FISHERY COMMISSION. 



YI. 



ri OSIVC VRUl'MENT OF IIOX. RICHARD H. DANA, JR., OX BEHALF OF THE 



UNITED STATES. 



FRIDAY, November 9, 1877. 

 Mai/ it pleaxe Your Excellency and Your Honors : 



Certaiulv, in the discharge of our respective duties on this high 

 occasion, we are met under most favorable auspices. Our tribunal is 

 one of our o\vu selection. The two parties to the question, Great Brit- 

 ain and the United States of America, have each chosen its represent- 

 ative upon the Board ; and, as to the President and Umpire of the Tri- 

 bunal, while the treaty obliged us, by reason of the lapse of time, to 

 refer the appointment to the representative of a foreign power at Lon- 

 don, yet it is well known that the appointment was made in conformity 

 with the expressed wish of those governments, who found, as the head 

 of this court, one with character so elevated and accomplishments so 

 rare that they had no difficulty in agreeing upon him themselves. 



\Ve have been fortunate, gentlemen of the Commission, that no mis- 

 fortune, no serious accident, in the long period of three months that so 

 many gentlemen have been together, has fallen upon us. The shadow 

 of death has not crossed our path, nor that of any of ours at a distance, 

 uor even has sickness visited us in any perilous manner. We have 

 been sustained all the while by the extreme hospitality and kindness of 

 the people of this city, who have done every thing to make our stay here 

 as agreeable as possible, and to breathe away any feeling we might 

 have had at the beginning that there might be any antagonism which 

 would be felt beyond the legitimate contests of the profession. The 

 kindest feeling and harmony prevail among us all. Your legislature of 

 this province has set apart for our use this beautiful hall, and while my 

 friend and associate, Mr. Trescot, saw, in the presence of the portrait 

 of His Majesty, which looks down upon us from the walls, an encourage- 

 ment for the settlement of the matter confided to us, because that king 

 supposed it settled more than a hundred years ago, I confess that the 

 presence of that image has been to me throughout interesting and al- 

 most painful. It was the year that he ascended to the throne that the 

 French were finally driven from Xorth America and that it all became 

 British America, from the southern coast of Georgia up to the North 

 Pole, and all these islands and peninsulas which form the Gulf of St. 

 Lawrence passed under his scepter. And what a spectacle for him to 

 look down upon now, after a hundred years ! A quiet assembly of gen- 

 tlemen, without any parade or ostentation, without an armed soldier at 

 the gate or door, settling the vexed question of the fisheries which, in 

 former times and under other auspices, would have been cause enough 

 for war. 



And settling them between whom ? Between his old thirteen colonies, 

 now become a republic of forty millions of people, bounded by seas and 

 zones, and his own empire, its scepter still held in his own line, by the 

 aughter of his own son, more extended, and counting an immensely 

 larger population than when he left it, showing us not only the magni- 

 tude, and increase, and greatness of the republic, but the stability, the, 

 security and the dignity of the British Crown. Yes, gentlemen of the 

 imiHHion, when he ascended the throne, and before that, when his 

 ither, whose portrait also adorns these walls, sat upon the throne 

 England, this whole region was a field of contest between France and 

 Great Britain. It was not then British North America. Which should 



