ARGUMENT OF MR. ROOT 47 



the most convenient port, treaty or non-treaty coast, to buy bait. 

 The fishermen find out where they are most hkely to get it, and they 

 run into one place or another place, as the case may be. Sometimes 

 it is very plentiful in one place, and then again the horn of plenty 

 will be poured out in another direction. They go where they think 

 they can get it. But so long as they were buying it, it made no 

 difference whether they were on treaty coast or non-treaty coast. 

 That is not very definite, but that is my inference, from reading 

 all this great mass of documents. 



Now, pari passu with this practice of purchase which had been 

 continued time out of mind, and imder which the local population 

 had come to conceive that they had rights against the substitution 

 of taking for purchasing, there ran a series of shore protection 

 statutes and executive acts. The first of that series to which I 

 ask your attention is the denial to American fishermen of any shore 

 rights whatever, under the treaty of 1818. They were denied back 

 in 1839, by that opinion of the Law Offigers of the Crown in which, 

 like the Colossus of Rhodes, they fell off the headlands into the 

 sea. They, being asked whether the American fishermen had any 

 right to use the strand of the Magdalen Islands for the purpose of 

 hauling their nets, answered No, with the admirable logic involved 

 in the proposition that because the treaty granted American fisher- 

 men rights to go ashore on the south coast of Newfoundland to dry 

 and cure their fish, therefore there was a necessary impUcation 

 that they could not draw their nets on the strand of the Magdalen 

 Islands. That opinion the Tribunal will find referred to many 

 times afterwards in the correspondence. The Hahfax British 

 counsel stated what was considered to be the situation at p. 538 

 of the United States Counter-Case Appendix — the situation, I 

 mean, as to American shore rights. I read now from just below 

 the middle of p. 538, where they say: 



"The Convention of 1818 entitled United States citizens to fish on the 

 shores of the Magdalen Islands, but denied them the privilege of landing 

 there. Without such permission the practical use of the inshore fisheries was 

 impossible." 



I hope the Tribunal will observe the progressive effect of these 

 different things which I am going to refer to, to the ultimate end 



