QUESTION ONE. 23 



shown by the following extract from a letter addressed by Mr. Bagot 

 to Mr. Monroe (27th November, 1816) : 



" It will be in your recollection that, early in the month of July 

 last, I had the honour to acquaint you that I had received instruc- 

 tions from my Government to assure you that, although it had been 

 felt necessary to resist the claim which had been advanced by Mr. 

 Adams, the determination had not been taken in any unfriendly 

 feeling towards America, or with any illiberal wish to deprive her 

 subjects of adequate means of engaging in the fisheries ; but that, on 

 the contrary, many of the considerations which had been urged by 

 Mr. Adams, on behalf of the American citizens formerly engaged in 

 this occupation, had operated so forcibly in favour of granting to 

 them such a concession as might be consistent with the just rights 

 and interests of Great Britain, that I had been furnished with full 

 powers from His Royal Highness the Prince Regent to conclude an 

 arrangement upon the subject, which it was hoped might at once 

 offer to the United States a pledge of His Royal Highness's goodwill, 

 and afford to them a reasonable participation of those benefits of 

 which they had formerly the enjoyment." (British Case, App., 

 p. 77.) 



These negotiations also failed to produce agreement. They were 

 reopened in London in 1818, and resulted in the treaty of that year. 

 The instructions to the British Commissioners (24th August, 1818) 

 contained the following: 



"The accompanying papers will bring the present state of the 

 fishery question under your view. I refer you to the proceedings at 

 Ghent for those arguments upon which the British plenipotentiaries 

 maintained, as I conceive unanswerably, that the second branch of 

 the 3rd Article of the treaty of 1783 had expired with the war. The 

 negative of this proposition was certainly contended, but very feebly, 

 by the American plenipotentiaries, which is proved almost to the 

 extent of an admission of the principles contended for on the part of 

 this Government by their tendering an article in which the same 

 privileges were, by a fresh stipulation, to be again secured to the 

 subjects of the United States upon an equivalent offered on their 

 part." (British Case, App., p. 85.) 



During the negotiations the United States Commissioners presented 

 a draft of a proposed article in which the operative words were that 

 the inhabitants of the United States should " continue to en- 

 27 joy " the liberty, &c., and they accompanied it with the follow- 

 ing " Explanatory Memorandum ": 



" The American plenipotentiaries presented for consideration an 

 article on the subject of certain fisheries. They stated, at the same 

 time, that as the United States considered the liberty of taking, 

 drying, and curing fish, secured to them by the treaty of peace of 1783, 

 as being unimpaired, and still in full force for the whole extent of 

 the fisheries in question, whilst Great Britain considered that liberty 

 as having been abrogated by warj and as, by the article now pro- 

 posed, the United States offered to desist irom their claim to a cer- 



