tively lies ready to hand. If it were to appeal to the imagination with something of the dignity and prestige of a great court, the members having the status of judges, independent and unaffected by party affiliations, the Commission might in time have wider questions referred to it than any that have yet been brought before it. These judges could not be allowed to become the umpires of national policies. Neither people would consent to take these from their legislatures and hand them to a court, however distinguished. But many matters might be dealt with before they reach the stage of national policy, which if taken early need not develop into international issues. Experience and wisdom speaking from a tribunal which has popular respect might solve these without raising the dust of controversy.

The project of the development of the St Lawrence waterway for ocean-going shipping and for the creation of electric power from the canalization works involved has been before the people of both countries for many years. Consideration was suspended during the War, but in 1919 Congress expressed a desire that the International Joint Commission should investigate the problem of its feasibility and cost. The Commission reported in 1922, and in the same year the American government communicated in regard to it with the Canadian government, which took action in 1924. The United States was ready to negotiate a

treaty but Canada hesitated on account of the cost and the magnitude of the questions involved. However, a committee of engineers from both nations is at work investigating the formulation of the problems which are to be considered by both countries. If this project is carried out it will probably be more significant for Canada than for the United States, as she holds the strategic position; but a mutually satisfactory solution would bind the two countries in closer friendly relations.

T

CHAPTER III

Fisheries Disputes

THE ATLANTIC FISHERIES

HE recurrent controversies occasioned by the taking of fish in territorial waters or the open sea have periodically aroused deep resentment against the United States because the people of the provinces believed that the action of the Americans was an invasion of their natural rights, to say nothing of the interference with their already sufficiently precarious means of livelihood. All around the coasts of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick the bays and harbours are dotted with fishermen's houses, and though in some parts these folk have thriven, their living is subject to great fluctuations. They are first-class sailors and have built for themselves a fleet of staunch vessels in which they ply their fishing on the Grand Banks during the spring and summer; they also fish in the bays and along the shores. The bank fishing consists chiefly of cod; the in-shore of mackerel, herring, haddock, lobster and swordfish.

Their great rivals sail from Gloucester, Massachusetts, as their predecessors have done for many generations. More than a century and a half ago some of these New England people placed their

homes on the southern shores of Nova Scotia, and their descendants still bear names that prove their affinity with families on Cape Cod and its vicinity. But during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the movement has all been in the other direction. A large proportion of the crews of the Gloucester fleet are "blue-noses1," and it was no mere chance that in the international race of deep-sea fishing vessels in 1923 the captain of the Gloucester competitor was a Nova Scotian by birth. The life aboard these trim Gloucester schooners has been depicted in Captains Courageous; and their trade was thus described by Mr Root in his argument before the North Atlantic Fisheries Arbitrators:

The ships leave the Massachusetts and the Maine coasts at the very end of the winter, the beginning of spring, the last of February or the first of March, and they go up to the Banks, take as many fish as they can with the bait that they can carry and keep, and then they go to the nearest point to get bait and back to the Banks...they go to and fro for bait. Even if bait were unlimited down on the Massachusetts coast, the long voyage for a sailing vessel to get it and back again would exhaust the time which they should expend in catching cod-fish. The Bank season ends along in the autumn, and the vessels which are employed in it must either lie up and the men employed in it sit idle until the next spring, or some other occupation must be found. This winter herring fishery affords occupation for vessels and men during the off-season of the Bankfishery, and so enables that fishery to be prosecuted profitably.

1 The origin of this name for people of the Maritime provinces, and more especially Nova Scotia, is uncertain.

Though these Gloucester fishermen have natural disadvantages as compared with their rivals, they have the more than compensating immense market of the United States close at hand. This has been usually shut against the Canadians who therefore have to sell much of their catch in Europe and in the West Indies. But the Americans could not conduct profitable fishing on the Grand Banks if they were not allowed to get wood and water and harbour protection in distress; they would be seriously handicapped if they were refused ice and bait at the nearest ports, and inconvenienced if they could not ship their fresh catch through Maritime ports to the United States. Clearly it was a case for bargaining if the Canadians had absolute rights within their own territorial waters. This, however leads us back to the Treaty of 1783.

The third article was one of those most strongly debated. The colonial Americans knew well the value of the fisheries, as being one of their chief sources of food supply, and claimed that they had developed them, though in fact they had entered into a heritage which through centuries had belonged in succession to Bretons, Spanish, French and English. But they were successful in wresting from England in her weakness the concession of continuing to enjoy unmolested the "right" to all the advantages which the inhabitants of British North America and Newfoundland had as to fishing, and to dry their fish on any un