Appendix to the Memorial. 121 



my ownership. The statute has no regard to ownership or pos- 

 session ; it is the act of fishing without reference to the ownership 

 of the thing fished for that it prohibits. 



Nor does the fact that the master and crew of the G erring 

 may have been ignorant of their whereabouts, may have had no 

 desire or intention of trespassing upon Canadian territory or of 

 violating Canadian law, affect the legal question. We are not 

 dealing here with the master or crew. Neither the treaty nor the 

 statute purports to punish them for violating the treaty's provi- 

 sions. In the eye of the statute the vessel itself is the offender. 

 The statute gives to it a moral consciousness — a personality — a 

 capacity to act within or without the law, and imposes upon it the 

 liability of forfeiture in the event of transgression. In the en- 

 forcement of fiscal law, of statutes passed for the protection of 

 the revenue or of public property, such provisions are as necessary 

 as they are universal, and neither ignorance of law, nor, as a 

 general rule, ignorance of fact, will prevent a forfeiture when 

 the proceeding is against the thing ofifending, whether it be the 

 smuggled goods or the purloined fish, or the vehicle or vessel, the 

 instrument or abettor of the offence. If I bring dutiable goods 

 into Canada without paying duty, I am liable to penalty although 

 ignorant of the tariff. The goods themselves, endowed by law 

 as they are with faculty and right of speech, cannot plead my 

 ignorance either of law or fact as a bar to forfeiture. 



According to my understanding of my own language, accord- 

 ing to my idea as to what is the universal meaning of the term 

 "fishing," no one, it seems to me, would describe the acts being 

 done by the Gerring at the time of seizure by any other term than 

 that of "fishing"; nor do I feel called upon out of deference to 

 any supposed canon of strict construction — a rule as often honoured 

 in the breach as the observance — to emasculate language, to filch 

 from that word — a word which, with recognized variations, ap- 

 pears to be common to all the Aryan races — all but a fraction of 

 its meaning, confining it to a petty segment of that wide circum- 

 ference of idea that has belonged to it for centuries. 



An additional consideration is not without weight. In order 

 to the success of the appellant, a modified, secondary or circum- 

 scribed meaning must be given to that word "fishing." To ex- 

 cuse, much more to justify, a deviation from its primary meaning, 



