ARGUMENT OF MR. ROOT 323 



that the British had the right that they were granting. The two 

 are world-wide apart. One is a renunciation and the other is not. 

 Of course the Americans were abandoning their claim of right to 

 all the coasts, that they did not expressly get granted to them in 

 this article. They were abandoning it. They could no longer 

 have it when the settlement had been made upon the basis of 

 their having a right to fish only on such and such coasts. But 

 the American renunciation was an abandonment by their renouncing 

 what they had, what they still asserted was theirs, while the British 

 proposal was that the abandoimient should be accomplished by 

 being silent, assuming that they had nothing except what the British 

 chose to grant in making an express grant for that purpose. 



There is only one other subject to which I feel bound to refer, 

 and that is the Webster circular, or the Webster pronunciamento 

 or proclamation. That paper appears in the British Appendix, 

 p. 152, and it is the contention of Great Britain that that paper 

 was a surrender by the United States, or an admission by the 

 United States, that the treaty did give to the renunciation clause 

 the effect of covering these great bays. It is an extraordinary 

 statement — extraordinary in every feature; and it is especially 

 extraordinary in the fact that it says, at the same time, that 



"It would appear that, by a strict and rigid construction of this article, 

 fishing vessels of the United States are precluded from entering into the bays 

 or harbors of the British provinces " 



and that it was an oversight in the negotiators of the treaty to make 

 so large a concession to England, and that Mr. Webster does not 

 agree with the construction put upon the treaty which makes it a 

 concession. A most amazing paper, by the Secretary of State of 

 the United States, charged with the conduct of her foreign affairs. 

 The lines were drawn, and had for years been drawn, between the 

 two countries in direct opposition upon the construction of this 

 treaty; and he issues this public proclamation, which he publishes 

 in a newspaper. It is quite inexplicable upon any ordinary grounds, 

 in any ordinary way. Mr. Everett says, in a letter which appears 

 at p. 543 of the American Appendix, that Lord Malmesbury ascribed 

 the extraordinary nature of the paper to two causes: one "the 

 influences which periodical events exercised in those localities might 



