1688 AWARD OF THE FISHERY COMMISSION. 



readv to pay anything that this Commission may say it ought to pay, 

 as I have no doubt Great Britain stands content, if you shall be obliged 

 to say what we think, in our own judgment, you should say, that you 

 cannot see in this extension, along the fringes of a great garment, of 

 our right to fish over portions of this region, anything which equals the 

 money value that the British Dominion aiM Provinces certainly receive 

 from an obligation on our part to lay no duties whatever upon their im- 

 portations of fish and fish-oil. But while we are not here to depreciate 

 anything, it is our duty to see to it that no extravagant demands shall 

 pass unchallenged, to meet evidence with evidence, and argument with 

 argument, fairly before a tribunal competent and able. We do not 

 mean that our side shall suffer at all from too great depreciation of the 

 evidence and arguments of the counsel for the Crown, as we feel quite 

 sure that the cause of the Crown has suffered from the extravagant de- 

 mands with which its case has been opened, and the extravagant and 

 promiscuous kind of evidence, of all sorts of damages, losses, and inju- 

 ries which it saw fit to gather and bring before this tribunal, from the 

 fisherman who thought that his wife had been frightened and his poultry- 

 yard robbed by a few American fishermen out upon a lark, to the min- 

 ister of marine and fisheries of the Dominion, with his innumerable 

 light-houses and buoys and improved harbors. We are to meet argu- 

 ment with argument, evidence with evidence, upon the single question 

 submitted, and that is, as I have had the honor to state before, " Is 

 there a money value in this extension of our right, or rather this with- 

 drawal of the claim of exclusion on the part of Great Britain, greater 

 than the value which Great Britain certainly receives f -om our guarantee 

 that we will lay no duties whatever upon her fish and fish-oil ? " 



Now, may it please your excellency, the question is not whether two 

 dollars a barrel on mackerel and one dollar a barrel on herring is pro- 

 hibitory, because we had a right, before making this treaty, to lay duties 

 that should be prohibitory, if those were not. If two dollars were not, 

 we could lay as much as we pleased, so that it would be an imperfect 

 consideration of this case, it has been all along an imperfect consider- 

 ation of this case, to ask the question whether two dollars a barrel 

 is prohibitory, whether two dollars a barrel on mackerel or one dol- 

 lar a barrel on herring can be overcome by any commercial method 

 or enterprise of the Dominion and the provinces. The question has 

 been between the right to be secured agaiust laying duties indefinitely, 

 on the part of the United States, on the one hand, and this extension 

 of the right of fishing a little nearer to the shores, on the other. We 

 could, if we saw fit, make a kind of self adjusting tariff, that whenever 

 ish rose above a certain price, then the Dominion and Canadian fish 

 t be admitted, and otherwise not; or we could hold it in our hands, 

 and legislate from day to day as we saw fit. Before leaving this ques- 

 tion of the money value of the withdrawal of the claim, of exclusion 

 trom a portion of this coast by Great Britain, I must take the liberty 

 to repeat to this court, that I may be sure that it does not escape their 

 t attention, that the right to exclude us, independent of the Treaty 

 IS, we do not and never have acknowledged ; and by the Treaty 

 >S we arranged it as a compromise on a disputed question. That 

 claim to exclude is contested, difficult of interpretation, expensive, and 

 The geographical limit is not easily determined ; in respect 

 >ays and harbors, it is entirely undetermined, and apparently must 

 80, each case being a case a good deal sui generis, and the mean- 

 extent of the power and authority which goes with that geo- 

 1 extension beyond the shore, whatever it may be, is all the 



