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ot the most distinguished talents of each party, the acuteness of 

 whose conceptions is always kept in full play by the contending 

 pretensions they have respectively to consult and sustain ; and that 

 therefore a distinction was made, and was intended to be made, at 

 the time of the negotiation between a right derived from the God 

 of nature, and to be exercised on the common field of his bounty, the 

 great high-way of nations; and the Zi6crZ?/, permission, or indulgence, 

 as they will term it, to continue the exercise of an employment on 

 the coast at the very doors, and withm the peculiar and especial 

 jurisdiction, of another nation : the one according to this doctrine 

 being a right inherent and not to be drawn in question, the other 

 a sufferance open to modification or denial altogether subsequently 

 to a war, according to the will or the interests of the party origin- 

 ally acceding to it. 



** The liberty, for the expression of the treaty in the discussion 

 between the two nations must be admitted, whether it operate ad- 

 versely or favourably to us, rests for its own continuance either as 

 we assert on the ground of right as an anterior possession and a 

 perpetual franchise, or as the British will contend on the existence 

 of the treaty of 17B3. The first ground to be supported on the 

 view taken of it in your own letter and in that which you had the 

 goodness to communicate to me, and even on the second, admitting 

 pro forma that a declaration of war does ipso facto abrogate all 

 previous treaty stipulations brought into contest by it, unless tacitly 

 or expressly renewed by a new treaty to be an acknowledged prin- 

 ciple of international law, still the right in question could, I be- 

 lieve, rest untouched and unaffected, although I know not with 

 what degree of decision or determination the negation of a future 

 use of the coast fisheries was brought forward in the negotiations 

 at Ghent by the British commissioners. But while on the one 

 hand the coupling the offer to treat for a renewal of the liberty of 

 the coast fisheries for an equivalent with a proposition to treat for 

 a renewal of the right of the free navigation of the Mississippi, 

 also for an equivalent, unless, as has been suspected, they were 

 made with the insidious purpose of obtaining an admission that both 

 had already ceased to exist, shows the confidence they would wish 

 to appear to entertain in the soundness of their position, that the 

 war had extinguished both the right and the liberty : for the former, 

 the free navigation of the Mississippi, if force of language and repe- 

 tition are to have any weight, could not well have been placed on a 

 stronger basis, it being very expressly and explicitly contracted for 

 in the treaty of 1783, recognised in that of 1794, and again men- 

 tioned in a provisional article in 1796, still on the other hand, the 

 omission in the new treaty to state that the treaty of 1783 had ex- 

 pired or been annulled, and a reference having been made to it in 

 several instances, is a yet stronger evidence that they did consider 

 that treaty as remaining in existence and of consequence, entitled 

 to respect and observance in all such of its provisions as had not 

 been specially contravened in the new treaty. 



