APPENDIX TO CASE OF GREAT BRITAIN. 677 
I said that [ had no instructions on the subject, but that in view of 
the reported reply of the Parliamentary Under-Secretary to a question 
in the House of Commons that the legal proceeding in question was in 
the nature of a private suit, and did not interfere with the pending 
negotiations, I did not think that your Lordship oe the diplo- 
matic correspondence closed or even suspended. I added, however, 
that I would inform your Lordship of the inquiry he had made, 
No. 30. 
The Marquis of Salisbury to Sir J. Pauncefote. 
[ Telegraphic. ] 
FOREIGN OFFICE, February 10, 1891, 
With reference to your telegram of yesterday, I have to inform you 
that my reply to Mr. Blaine’s note of the 17th December, on the 
87 subject of Behring’s Sea, will be sent very shortly. I have 
delayed it with the object of obtaining information on a few 
points. 
There is not, in my view, any connection between the legal proceed- 
ings in the case of the “W. P. Sayward” and the diplomatic corre- 
spondence with regard to Behring’s Sea. 
No. 31. 
The Marquis of Salisbury to Sir J. Pauncefote. 
FOREIGN OFFICE, February 21, 1891. 
Str: The despatch of Mr. Blaine, under date of the 17th December, 
has been carefully considered by Her Majesty’s Government. The 
effect of the discussion which has been carried on between the two 
Governments has been materially to narrow the area of controversy. 
It is now quite clear that the advisers of the President do not claim 
Behring’s Sea as a mare clausum, and indeed that they repudiate that 
contention in express terms. Nor do they rely, as a justification for the 
seizure of British ships in the open sea, upon the contention that the 
interests of the seal fisheries give to the United States Government 
any right for that purpose which, according te international law, it 
would not otherwise possess. Whatever importance they attach to the 
preservation of the fur seal species,—and they justly look on it as an 
object deserving the most serious solicitude,—they do not conceive that 
it confers upon any Maritime Power rights over the open ocean which 
that Power could not assert on other grounds. 
The claim of the United States to prevent the exercise of the seal 
fishery by other nations in Behring’s Sea rests now exclusively upon 
the interest which by purchase they possess in a Ukase issued by the 
Emperor Alexander I. in the year 1821, which prohibits foreign vessels 
from approaching within 100 Italian miles of the coasts and islands 
then belonging to Russia in Behring’s Sea. It is not, as I understand, 
contended that the Russian Government, at the time of the issue of 
this Ukase, possessed any inherent right to enforce such a prohibition, 
