490 AMERICAN DIPLOMATIC QUESTIONS 



all waters lying without the marine jurisdiction of Great 

 Britain) and those fisheries that were prosecuted within such 

 marine jurisdiction (vaguely regarded then as all waters lying 

 within three leagues of the shore). The former, they were 

 willing to concede, belonged equally to all nations, as fixed 

 and permanent a right as the navigation of the high seas ; 

 the latter, the inshore fisheries, belonged to England alone, 

 and any transfer of privileges to other nations by treaty to 

 participate therein was necessarily in the form of a contract, 

 and contracts between nations are cancelled by war. 



The American commissioners took a radically different view 

 of the situation. It will be remembered that in 1782, when 

 the treaty of Paris was being negotiated, John Adams, sup- 

 ported by the opinions of many prominent men of New 

 England, had stoutly contended that these inshore fisher- 

 ies of Canada, together with all landing privileges to cure 

 fish, belonged to Americans, in equal right, as well as they 

 belonged to England. They had fought and bled for them, 

 and as American citizens they were entitled to them quite as 

 much as were the Canadians who had chosen to remain 

 British subjects. Mr. Livingstone, Secretary of State, in 

 writing of the bank fisheries to Benjamin Franklin, January 

 7, 1782, said: 



The arguments on which the people of America found their 

 claim to fish on the banks of Newfoundland arise, first, from their 

 having once formed a part of the British Empire, in which state 

 they always enjoyed, as fully as the people of Britain themselves, 

 the right of fishing on these banks. They have shared in all the 

 wars for the extension of that right, and Britain could with no 

 more justice have excluded them from the enjoyment of it (even 

 supposing that one nation could possess it to the exclusion of 

 another), while they formed a part of the empire, than they could 

 exclude the people of London or Bristol. . . . 



Upon the same principle that Mr. Livingstone supported 

 the American right to the Bank fishery, namely, previous 

 enjoyment of them as British subjects, Mr. Adams and his 

 colleagues claimed the inshore fisheries of Canada. He 



