have expended beyond all proportion more than you. If, then, the right cannot be denied, why should it not be acknowledged and be put out of dispute? Why should we leave room for illiterate fishermen to wrangle and chicane?" As finally signed on September 3, 1783, Article III of the treaty of Paris stands as follows:

It is agreed that the people of the United States shall continue to enjoy unmolested the right to take fish of every kind on the Grand Bank, and on all the other banks of Newfoundland; also in the Gulph of St. Lawrence, and at all other places in the sea, where the inhabitants of both countries used at any time heretofore to fish; and also that the inhabitants of the United States shall have the liberty to take fish of every kind on such part of the coast of Newfoundland as British fishermen shall use (but not to dry or cure the same on that island); and also on the coasts, bays and creeks, of all other of His British Majesty's dominions in America; and that the American fishermen shall have the liberty to dry and cure fish in any of the unsettled bays, harbours and creeks of Nova Scotia, Magdalen Islands, and Labrador, so long as the same shall remain unsettled; but so soon as the same, or either of them shall be settled, it shall not be lawful for the said fishermen to dry or cure fish at such settlement, without a previous agreement for that purpose with the inhabitants, proprietors or possessors of the ground.

It will be observed, then, that in regard to the fisheries, very few privileges enjoyed by the American colonists (as British subjects) were denied to them as American citizens by the treaty of Paris. The Bank fishery was recognized by England to be beyond her legislative control, and therefore open and free to the world; likewise the fishery of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The treaty rights to take fish in the inshore waters of Canada were ample; all that marine area, including the bays and creeks of the Dominion coast, was left free to American fishermen. Two restrictions only were placed upon them, first, that they should not use the Newfoundland shores for purposes of drying or curing their fish, and second, they should not, upon all the balance of the British-American coast (where such privileges were granted), so locate their stages as to molest or annoy the

inhabitants. This latter restriction was a proper and wise one, and could have called for no reasonable complaint. The withholding from American fishermen of the Newfoundland shores for the purpose of curing fish was regarded as unfortunate, for these being nearer the Banks were more convenient for the establishment of shore stations. Had American citizens been accorded this one additional right to the others acquired by the treaty, there would virtually have been no distinction drawn between American and English fishermen in their freedom of movements in Canadian territorial waters or on Canadian soil.

IV

At the close of the Revolutionary War, the fisheries were substantially annihilated, and their restoration to a condition of vigor was neither immediate nor rapid. An order issued by proclamation (July, 1783) in London, prohibited the importation of American fish into British West Indian ports. This action was a telling blow to the greatly weakened American industry, and adverse tariff regulations in various foreign markets added to the causes that retarded its growth. To offset these depressing foreign influences, efforts were made by Congress to stimulate the languishing fisheries by means of bounties. In 1789 an act was passed allowing a bounty of five cents per quintal on all dried, and five cents a barrel on all pickled (salted) fish exported, and, at the time, imposing a duty on fish imported into the United States. Even this encouragement seems to have been insufficient, for the fishermen of Gloucester soon after presented a petition to Congress setting forth a grievous story of their losses, with a prayer for further measures of relief.

The necessity of reviving the fisheries seems to have been generally accepted by the legislators of the period. The reasons given were not simply that the industry was in itself a valuable one and promised wealth to its followers, but higher considerations of national utility were advanced for its encouragement. President Washington, in 1790, an

nounced that "our fisheries and the transportation of our own produce offer us abundant means for guarding ourselves against depending upon foreign vessels." The views of Congress are reflected in its reply to the President's message: "The navigation and the fisheries of the United States are objects too interesting not to inspire a disposition to promote them by all the means which shall appear to us consistent with their natural progress and permanent prosperity."

The fishermen's appeal was answered, and in 1792 a new law was created abolishing the bounties on exported fish, and in lieu thereof a specific tonnage allowance was made to all American vessels engaged in the fisheries. This law was more or less altered by subsequent legislative acts, until finally all bounties and allowances to fishermen were abolished in 1854. These various bounty acts had always met more or less opposition on constitutional grounds. A generation later, Senator Benton opposed them with all the vigor and strength which that parliamentary leader possessed. Further legislative measures were taken to improve the condition of the fishermen by the act of 1793 authorizing the customs officials to grant to fishing vessels licenses "to touch and trade" at any foreign port or place. The object of this act was to enable the fishermen to purchase in foreign ports, and free of all duties, — needful supplies of salt, provisions, fishing gear, etc. This privilege was certainly of great benefit to the fishermen, who availed themselves of it to carry on regular trading operations in Newfoundland and in Canadian ports. Thus it soon led to abuses that later ushered in a series of diplomatic complications, and added to the "fishery question" new elements of controversy.

Despite these earnest efforts to infuse new life into the crippled fisheries, they rallied but slowly from the shock of war. Statistics of the yearly catches from 1789 to 1812 indicate a wavering increase in vessels and tonnage employed, but the fishermen had nevertheless reason to rejoice in fairly bright prospects for renewal of the prosperity they had enjoyed before the Revolution. When their hopes were about to be realized, the shadow of the approaching political

crises of 1812 depressed the fisheries. Jefferson's Embargo measures brought great distress to the fishermen, and the advent of war soon after drove them from the Banks, and completely paralyzed their industry.

V

Immediately following the withdrawal of the British forces from the United States at the close of the Revolutionary War, a strong dislike was manifested for the "Tories,” or those who had remained loyal to England throughout the struggle for independence. Numbers of these disaffected people emigrated to Nova Scotia and to Canada; not a few of them established homes in Newfoundland. These disappointed men, no doubt nurturing feelings of resentment, regarded with jealous interest the operations of American fishermen in Canadian waters. As loyal emigrants making new settlements on the coasts of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, they were naturally loath to recognize the rights of American fishermen under the treaty of 1783, namely, to use British shores for drying and curing their fish; and they were in a mood to record eagerly any transgression of privileges by their old enemies as they were always vigilant to detect them in misdeeds of any kind. These unfriendly settlers along the Canadian shores were largely instrumental, it is known, in causing the British colonies in 1807 to make protests to their home government against the conduct of the Americans; later, upon the outbreak of hostilities between England and the United States, and the consequent abrogation of all former treaties between those powers, they took the opportunity to urge upon the British Government a refusal to renew any fishing privileges whatever in their waters. These appeals, backed by many representations of the pernicious moral influences exerted by New England fishermen over the inhabitants of Nova Scotia and Labrador, through their evasions of custom duties, illicit trading, etc., soon convinced the British ministry that England had been far too generous for her own good in granting such extended

and valuable fishery rights to her seceded colonists. Accordingly, at the close of the War of 1812 (though before the battle of New Orleans), when the American peace commissioners arrived in Ghent for the purpose of making a new treaty with England, they were met at the outset by the assertion of the British commissioners that "it was thought proper in candor to state, that in relation to the fisheries, although it was not intended to contest the right of the United States to them, yet so far as respected the concessions to land and dry fish within the exclusive jurisdiction of the British, it was proposed not to renew that without an equivalent," and further, that "the British Government did not intend to grant to the United States gratuitously the privileges formerly granted by treaty to them, of fishing within the limits of the British sovereignty, and of using the shores of the British territories for purposes connected with the British fisheries." John Quincy Adams, speaking for the American commissioners, replied that they had not intended to mention the subject of fisheries, that question not being one of the subjects of difference in the war just concluded.

Although it had become apparent before 1812 that different conceptions of the force and character of the third article of the treaty of Paris were held in England and the United States, then for the first time, the opposing views, as to the exact nature of American claims to the inshore fisheries as expressed by that article, came face to face.

The English held that the liberties accorded the Americans by the third article of the treaty of 1783 to fish within the territorial waters of Great Britain and to land on the shores of Nova Scotia, to dry and cure fish, were in the nature of a grant or a concession, and were liable, as are all such treaty rights and privileges, to abrogation by subsequent war between the parties. The British commissioners assumed, therefore, that these inshore privileges had been terminated by the War of 1812, and that should the United States desire a renewal or modification of them, such could only be obtained through new treaty stipulations. They drew a distinction, however, between the fisheries on the Banks (or in