S6 FISHERIES ARBITRATION AT THE HAGUE 



stay at home. They were not resting fish, they were resting 

 Newfoundlanders. 



Let me observe here that this provision in the regulations of 

 1 89 1 which was discovered during the course of Sir James Winter's 

 argument, and suggested to him, which he, with all his intimate 

 knowledge of the situation, did not know of, was there but one 

 year. When the commissioner came to make up regulations in 

 189 1, he changed the old rule about nets on Sunday. The old rule 

 was that they could not set the nets on Sunday and they could not 

 haul them on Sunday, but there was nothing to prevent their being 

 set on Saturday and left there to work, like money at interest, 

 while one slept, to work all day Sunday catching fish, and let them 

 be taken out on Monday. There was nothing in the law to pre- 

 vent that until 1891, when those new regulations were made. And 

 the commissioner making the regulations put in that the nets 

 should not be left in the water over Sunday. The next year it 

 was taken out, and in these regulations now it does not appear. 

 They have gone back to the old law. 



The Sunday provision is a curious one in another way. That 

 also, you will observe, is subject to the exceptions of this controlling 

 Act of 1884, which, notwithstanding any law to the contrary, gives 

 the Newfoundlander the right to take his bait at any time and in 

 any way. So that the Sunday provision applies only to bait, and 

 does not apply to Newfoundlanders taking bait for the bank 

 fishery, but only to the persons who, as Bret Harte says in one of 

 his stories of life in a Western village, are regarded by the inhab- 

 itants as having the defective moral quality of being foreigners. 



Then there is another interesting circumstance which you will 

 find by looking at paragraph 78 of these same 1898 regulations, 

 on page 209 of the American Case Appendix, at the end of the page. 

 This enlarges the Simday prohibition, so that it applies not merely 

 to herring but to any bait fish: 



"No person shall between the hours of twelve o'clock on Saturday night 

 and twelve o'clock on Sunday night, take or catch in any manner whatsoever 

 any herring, capUn, squid, or any other bait fish, or set or put out any contriv- 

 ance whatsoever for the purpose of taking or catching herring, caplin, squid 

 or other bait fish. Caplin may be taken for fertilizing purposes by farmers 

 or their employees during the usual season." 



