226 FISHERIES ARBITRATION AT THE HAGUE 



the Roman law gave to the grantee the right to say where he should 

 lay out his path or his road; subject always to the rule of common 

 sense, that he must not exercise his discretion in a way unnecessarily 

 and burdensomely to injure. 



These great and authorized representatives of Great Britain 

 were without question applying to the construction of this grant 

 the ordinary and natural rule of construction. They might well 

 have added, and to support the view they took, the view the British 

 Government took for sixty-two years after this treaty was made, 

 the view the makers of the treaty took, and we may add another 

 principle of construction which is binding upon us; that we must 

 construe the grant of a deed or a contract in such a way as to make 

 it effective, and we are not at Kberty to construe it in such a way 

 as to destroy the grant; and to construe this grant now upon this 

 new and latter-day theory, to construe this grant in such a way as 

 to reverse the ordinary application of the canon of construction, 

 and to carry the discretion, not to the person who has to do the act, 

 but to the person who has granted the right to do the act, and make 

 the exercise of the right subject to the power of the grantor of the 

 right, in its uncontrolled judgment, to h'mit and restrain, is making 

 it bear in its own breast the seeds of its own destruction. 



We may add to the support of the British position in all that 

 long period before the pressure of the Newfoundland trader began 

 to warp the expression and the action of British statesmen — ■ we 

 may add in support of that earlier position the rule that the words 

 of a grant by deed or contract are to be construed in the sense in 

 which the grantor had reason to believe the grantee understood 

 them, a rule of morality, a ride of good faith and honor; and here, 

 without contradiction, is the evidence as to how the grantee of 1818 

 understood this grant in the statement of Mr. Gallatin, which stated 

 that the right was regarded as what the French civilians call a 

 servitude. 



When we attempt to read into this grant, contrary to the 

 accepted principles of construction, contrary to the construction 

 of the makers and the construction of the two countries, a right of 

 the grantor to modify and change, to what do we appeal? To 

 nothing but the fact that Great Britain is sovereign there, and that 

 from the fact of sovereignty must be imphed the right to control. 



