ADDENDUM. 



415 



more right than any other foreign nation to the navigation of this river. 

 But if further research and discovery should establish the fact that the 

 waters of the Mississippi connect themselves with Upper Canada, as 

 those of the St. Lawrence do with the United States, then, and in that 

 case, the American government would be both willing to recognise and 

 ready to concede the right of British subjects freely to navigate the 

 Mississippi through such connexion from the lakes, or the land, to the 

 sea.* 



"With regard to the St. Lawrence, the American Executive advanced, 

 among other arguments, the very doctrine that, in its comprehensive 

 sense, now applies to the Amazon. 



"In the case of the St. Lawrence, two powers, and only two, were 

 concerned in its navigation. Though each owned a portion of the 

 great lakes, yet neither of them did as the upper riparian States of the 

 Amazon have done, viz: cqnvert those upper waters into inland seas, 

 by declaring their navigation free, and inviting all the world to come, 

 and each nation under its own flag, for traffic and trade. 



"Had the United States been the sole proprietor of the great lakes^ 

 and had it been thought proper to proclaim the freedom of the seas for 

 these waters, and to make the navigation of them as free to all nations 

 as is the navigation of the blue waters of the deep sea, then the naviga- 

 tion of the St. Lawrence would have been a question in which the 

 whole commercial world would have been equally interested with this 

 government. It would have represented the case of the Dardanelles 

 after Russia became part owner of the Black sea, and the navigation of 

 it was thrown open to the world. It would have been an exact type of 

 the case presented with regard to the Amazon since the decrees of 

 Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador, which have made the running waters of it 

 and its navigable tributaries as free to man's use as is the air we breathe, 

 or the blue waters ploughed by American keels in the middle of the 

 ocean. 



"But as it is, principles broad enough to cover this case of the Amazon 

 were laid down by American statesmen with regard to the St. Lawrence? 

 when they maintained that if that river had been 'regarded as a strait 

 connecting navigable seas, as it ought properly to be, there would be 

 less controversy. The principle on which the right to navigate straits 

 depends is, that they are accessorial to those seas which they unite, 

 and the right of navigating, which is not exclusive, but common to all 



*Mr. Clay to Mr. Gallatin, June, 1836. 



