1700 AWARD OF THE FISHERY COMMISSION. 



lute right to lay duties without restriction, and a duty always laid of 

 two dollars a barrel, from which the Dominion is now protected, and free 

 admission to a market, which is their only market, you cannot find in the 

 value of this faculty or privilege taken in its historic view, taken with 

 all its circumstances, its uncertainties, its expenses, the perils of exercis- 

 ing it, and all that you cannot find in that an amount of money value 

 which equals the money value which the Dominion certainly does receive. 



Bringing it down, then, to a very few points, our position is this : We 

 bad, from the beginning down to 1818, a right to fish all over this re- 

 gion without any geographical limitation; we held it as a common her- 

 itage with all British subjects; we helped to conquer it, to bring it into 

 the possession of Great Britain; we always regarded it as ours. When 

 we had the war of the devolution, we put that and everything else at 

 stake. 1 concede it. The war did not destroy it. War never does. It 

 is not the declaration of war that transfers a city from you to your 

 enemy, it is the result of the war. Every war puts at stake the whole 

 territory. During the wars the boundaries of the two nations are the 

 line of bayonets, and nothing more nor less. But when the war ends, 

 if it is a conquest, the conquered party has no territory to bound ; he 

 depends on the will of the conqueror. If there is no conquest, and the 

 treaty is made upon the principle of titi possidetis, then the line of 

 bayonets, when the war closed, is the boundary. If peace is made upon 

 a special arrangement, or on the principle of in statu quo ante bellum, 

 then the powers are restored to their old rights. The peace which fol- 

 lowed our revolution was upon the latter principle. There was no con- 

 quest certainly none by Great Britain over us and peace was made 

 upon the principle in statu quo ante bellum, except that we arranged for 

 convenience the boundary-line a little different from what it was before 

 the war. Everything else stood as it stood before, on the principle in 

 gtatu quo ante bellum. And so stood the fisheries, which were just as 

 much our possession, our property, and always had been, as anything 

 lse that we held. We held them under our charters, and we held them 

 by right to the last, and the treaty was careful to say so, because, as 

 pointed out by Lord Loughborough in the House of Lords, and by 

 Lord North in the House of Commons, who was the instrument in the 

 hands of the King in bringing about the unhappy war (no one, I think, 

 considers it was "unhappy" now, on either side), they said: this treaty 

 does not concede the right to the Americans to fish within three miles; 

 it acknowledges it as an existing right, as one that they always had, 

 and it makes the usage to fish by the Americans as the final proof, in all 

 disputed questions of geography, political or natural. And so it rested 

 down to 1818. When the Treaty of Ghent was made, in December, 1814, 

 at the close of our war, the parties came together. The Americans utterly 

 refused to hear a word calling in question their right to the fisheries or 

 of geographical limits. Mr. Adams had his famous controversy with 

 Earl Bathurst, in which that question was so fully argued, summarized 

 in one j>ortion of Mr. Wheatou's work on international law, which has 

 been the study of statesmen ever since, and still more fully, perhaps, in 

 in Mr. Adams's book, which has been alluded to, in the controversy be- 

 tween himself and a certain politician who had undertaken to write a 

 copy of a letter different from the original, but where he went into the 

 whole question from beginning to end. 



But, in 1818, when Great Britain was at peace with all the world, and 

 when the two nations stood face to face over this subject, Great Britain 

 claiming largely, we did not know what fifty miles, sixty miles, un- 

 limited King's chambers; when vessels were arrested sixty miles from 



