ole APPENDIX TO CASE OF GREAT BRITAIN. 
sive jurisdiction and absolute control. No one, native or alien, but the Alaska Com- 
pany is to be allowed to catch seals in those waters, and any vessel, American or 
foreign, found violating this prohibition is to be seized. 
Can Mr. Blaine successfully maintain this claim in the diplomatic controversy 
which its announcement must provoke? Can our Government undertake to enforce 
it without inviting a foreign war? 
The claim is against universally recognized principles of international law. It is 
opposed to the traditions and precedents of our own Government. It is contrary to 
the record of the State Department on this very question as recently as the adminis- 
tration of Mr. Bayard. 
In the law of nations no principle is more settled than that the high seas are the 
public property of the world, which cannot be monopolized by any one Power, As 
Woolsey says: 
The high sea is free and open to all nations. It cannot be the property or the 
empire of a particular State. It cannot become property, for it cannot be possessed. 
It is clearly for the common benefit of mankind. It is a common pathway, separat- 
ing and yet binding, intended alike for all. 
It is equally well settled that a nation may own and exercise exclusive control over 
a ‘closed sea”—that is, a body of water either lying wholly within, or is almost 
entirely surrounded by, its own territory. The jurisdiction of every country over 
the ocean for a marine league, or 3 miles, from its coast is universally conceded. 
A glance at the map will show that Behring’s Sea is not a closed sea. It is a vast 
expanse of water more than 1,000 miles wide. It is not land-locked. It is part of 
the Pacific Ocean; it forms the water highway between that and the Arctic Ocean. 
To claim it is to claim the high seas. 
The State Department now bases its claim on the rights acquired from Russia when 
we purchased Alaska. ‘There can be no question that the United States succeeded 
to all the rights held by Russia. But what were Russia’s rights? 
It is true that Russia claimed Behring’s Sea long before we bought Alaska. But 
that country never had any exclusive right to it, for the simple reason that it never 
acquired, and never could acquire, except by the consent of nations, any such right. 
This Government cannot simply fall back on Russia’s claim. It will be required by 
foreign Powers to show that the claim is well founded, or abandon it. 
Russia’s claim was never conceded by any other Power. On the contrary, it was 
emphatically denied by the two foreign Powers most interested. It was denied by 
the United States, and it was denied by Great Britain. Russia yielded to this Goy- 
ernment in a Treaty made in 1824, and to England in one made in the following year. 
Our Treaty continued in force for only ten years, but we never conceded to Russia the 
right it claimed. 
If the State Department now undertakes to maintain Russia’s old claim it will be 
confronted not only by the opposition of Engiand, but also by its own record. More- 
over, it will run counter to the international principle it has invoked against foreign 
Powers in numerous cases, that an open sea cannot be exclusively controlled by any 
nation. 
282 APPENDIX NO. 8. 
“ Fur Seal Fisheries of the Pacific Coast and Alaska.” 
This pamphlet, in connection with the Chart inclosed, is designed to explain more 
particularly to our Eastern Senators and Congressmen the full value of the fur-seal 
fisheries, in order that when the question of re-leasing the fur-seal islands of St. George 
and St. Paul arises, they may know exactly what they are doing, so that they may 
not grant a monopoly to any firm or Company for a trifle, which has been done in 
the past to the Alaska Commercial Company of San Francisco. 
These islands are so far away from the eastern part of our country that the great 
majority of merchants and business men know comparatively nothing about this 
great industry, and the profits connected with the same. 
The writer, during the past two or three years, has met a great many eastern 
visitors to our coast, and whenever the question of the fur-seal fisheries has been 
brought up he finds that in all cases they have not the slightest idea of the same, 
and whenever the value is explained, and Charts shown, showing just how broad 
the claim our Government has taken in its jurisdiction of the Behring’s Sea, in pro- 
tection of the fur-seal, or more particularly protecting the Alaska Commercial Com- 
pany in their vast monopoly of the fur-seal fisheries, and by this monopoly enabling 
this Company to control nearly all of the fur trade of Alaska, they are astonished, 
and still more when it is further explained to them that the 100,000 fur-seals, as taken 
by the Alaska Commercial Company, bring nearly 2,000,000 dollars each year, and for 
edict 
