APPENDIX TO CASE OF GREAT BRITAIN. 679 
Mr. Blaine does not deal with these protests, which appear to Her 
Majesty’s Government to be in themselves amply sufficient to decide 
the question, whether Great Britain did or did not acquiesce in the 
Russian claim put forward by the Ukase. He confines himself mainly, 
in the despatch under consideration, to the consideration of the Treaties 
which were subsequently made between Great Britain and Russia and 
America and Russia in the year 1825; and especially of that between 
Russia and Great Britain. This Treaty, of which the text is printed at 
the close of Mr. Blaine’s despatch, does not contain a word to signify 
the acquiescence of Great Britain in the claim recently put forward by 
Russia to control the waters of the sea for 100 miles from her coast. 
There is no stipulation upon which this interpretation can be imposed 
by any process of construction whatsoever. But there is a provision 
having in our judgment a totally opposite tendency, which indeed was 
intended to negative the extravagant claim that had recently been made 
on the part of Russia; and it is upon this provision that the main part 
of Mr. Blaine’s argument, as I understand it, is founded. The stip- 
wlation to which I refer is contained in the Ist Article, and runs as 
follows: 
Article I. It is agreed that the respective subjects of the High Contracting Parties 
shall not be troubled or molested in any part of the ocean, commonly called the 
Pacific Ocean, either in navigating the same, in fishing therein, or in landing at such 
parts of the coast as shall not have been already occupied, in order to trade with the 
natives, under the restrictions and conditions specified in the following Articles. 
Tunderstand Mr. Blaine’s argument to be that if Great Britain had 
intended to protest against the claim of Russia to exclude ships for 100 
miles from her coasts in Behring’s Sea, she would have taken this oppor- 
tunity of doing so; but that in confining herself to stipulations in favour 
of full liberty of navigation and fishing in any part of the ocean, com- 
monly called the Pacific Ocean, she, by implication, renounced any 
claim that could arise out of the same set of circumstances in regard to 
any sea that was not part of the Pacific Ocean. And then Mr. Blaine 
goes on to contend that the phrase “ Pacific Ocean” did not and does 
not include Behring’s Sea. 
Even if this latter contention were correct, I should earnestly demur 
to the conclusion that our inherent rights to free passage and free fish- 
ing over a vast extent of ocean could be effectively renounced by mere 
reticence or omission. The right is one of which we could not be 
deprived unless we consented to abandon it, and that consent could not 
be sufficiently inferred from our negotiators having omitted to mention 
the subject upon one particular occasion. 
But Lam not prepared to admit the justice of Mr. Blaine’s contention 
that the words “ Pacific Ocean” did not include Behring’s Sea. I 
believe that in common parlance, then and now, Behring’s Sea was and 
is part of the Pacific Ocean; and that the latter words were used in 
order to give the fullest and widest scope possible to the claim which 
the British negotiators were solemnly recording of a right freely to 
navigate and fish in every part of it, and throughout its entire 
89 extent. In proofof the argument that the words ‘“ Pacific Ocean” 
do not include Behring’s Sea, Mr. Blaine adduces a long list of 
Maps in which a designation distinct from that of ‘ Pacific Ocean” is 
given to Behring’s Sea; either ‘“‘ Behring’s Sea,” or “Sea of Kam- 
schatka” or the “Sea of Anadir.” The argument will hardly have any 
force unless it is applicable with equal truth to all the other oceans 
of the world. Bnt no one will dispute that the Bay of Biscay forms part 
of the Atlantic Ocean, or that the Gulf of Lyons forms part of the 
