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APPENDIX TO CASE OF GREAT BRITAIN. 643 
declincd to ratify the Treaty unless the United States should surrender the proyision 
respecting that island. After that came the stringent enactment of Parliament 
forbidding vessels to hover within 24 miles of the island. The United States was 
already a great Commercial Power. She had 1,400,000 tons of shipping; more than 
500 ships bearing her flag were engaged im trade around the capes. Lord Salisbury 
has had much-to say about the liberty of the seas, but these 500 American ships 
were denied the liberty of the seas within a space of 50 miles wide in the South 
Atlantic Ocean by the express authority of Great Britain. 
The Act of Parliament which asserted this power over the sea was to be in force 
as long as Napoleon should live. Napoleon was born the same year with Wellington, 
and was therefore but 46 years of age when he was sent to St. Helena. His expecta- 
tion of life was then as good as that of the Duke, who lived until 1852. The order 
made in April 1816 to obstruct free navigation in a section of the South Atlantic 
might, therefore, have been in force for the period of thirty-six years, if not longer. 
It actually proved to be for five years only. Napoleon died in 1821. 
It is hardly conceivable that the same nation which exercised this authority in the 
broad Atlantic, over which, at that very time, 800,000,000 of people made their com- 
mercial exchanges, should deny the right of the United States to assume control over 
a limited area, for a fraction of each year, in a sea which lies far beyond the line of 
trade, whose silent waters were never cloven by a commercial prow, whose uninhab- 
ited shores have no port of entry, and could never be approached on a lawful errand 
under any other flag than that of the United States. Is this Government to under- 
stand that Lord Salisbury justifies the course of England? Is this Government to 
understand that Lord Salisbury maintains the right of England, at her will and 
pleasure, to obstruct the highway of commerce in mid-ocean, and that she will 
54 at the same time interpose objections to the United States exercising her juris- 
diction beyond the 3-mile limit, in a remote and unused sea, for the sole pur- 
pose of preserving the most valuable fur-seal fishery in the world from remediless 
destruction? 
If Great Britain shall consider that the precedent set at St. Helena of obstruction 
to the navigable waters of the ocean is too remote for present quotation, I invite 
her attention to one still in existence. Even to-day, while Her Majesty’s Govern- 
ment is aiding one of her Colonies to destroy the American seal fisheries, another 
Colony, with her consent, has established a pearl fishery in an area of the Indian 
Ocean 600 miles wide, And so complete is the assumption of power that, according 
to Sir George Baden-Powell, a licence-fee is collected from the vessels engaged in 
the pearl fisheries in the open ocean. The asserted power goes to the extent of 
making foreign vessels that have procured their pearls far outside the 3-mile limit 
pay a heavy tax when the vessels enter an Australian port to land cargoes and refit. 
Thus the foreign vessel is hedged in on both sides, and is bound to pay the tax under 
British law, because, as Sir George Baden-Powell intimates, the voyage to another 
port would probably be more expensive than the tax. I quote further from Sir 
George to show the extent to which British assumption of power over the Ocean 
has gone: 
“The right to charge these dunes and to exercise this control outside the 3-mile limit 
is based on an Act of the Federal Council of Australasia, which (Federal Council 
Act, 1885, sec. 15) enacts that the Council shall have legislative authority, inter alia, 
in respect to fisheries in Australian waters outside territorial limits. In 1889 this Council 
passed an Act to ‘regulate the pearl-shell and béche-de-mer fisheries in Australian 
waters adjacent to the Colony of Western Australia.’ In 1888 a similar Act had 
been passed, dealing with the fisheries in the seas adjacent to Queensland (on the 
east coast).” 
I am directed by the President to say that, on behalf of the United States, he is 
willing to adopt the text used in the Act of Parliament to exclude ships from hoy- 
ering nearer to the Island of St. Helena than 8 marine leagues, or he will take the 
example cited by Sir George Baden-Powell, where, by permission of Her Majesty’s 
Government, control over a part of the ocean 600 miles wide is to-day authorized by 
Australian law. ‘The President will ask the Government of Great Britain to agree 
to the distance of 20 marine leagues—within which no ship shall hover around the 
Islands of St. Paul and St. George, from the 15th May to the 15th October of each 
year. This will prove an effective mode of preserving the seal fisheries for the use 
of the civilized world—a mode which, in view of Great Britain’s assumption of 
power over the open ocean, she cannot with consistency decline. Great Britain 
prescribed 8 leagues at St. Helena; but the obvious necessities in the Behring’s Sea 
will, on the basis of this precedent, justify 20 leagues for the protection of the 
American seal fisheries. 
The United States desires only such control over a limited extent of the waters in 
the Behring’s Sea, for a part of each year, as will be sufficient to insure the protec- 
tion of the fur-seai fisheries, already injured, possibly, to an irreparable extent by 
the intrusion of Canadian vessels, sailing with the encouragement of Great Britain 
and protected by her flag. The gravest wrong is committed when (as in many 
