accommodate themselves to the waters of the gulf. Year by year they are made longer and deeper, that a school of fish may be more successfully enveloped by them. Then there must also be much better fishing in the gulf than has existed for several years past. It has been going down in value every year since the treaty went into effect. It has got down to an average by the Port Mulgrave returns (I mean by the portion of the returns which we have) of 125 barrels a vessel this year, and, according to the verbal statement of the collector of Port Mulgrave, 108 barrels is quite up to the average. If any one takes the trouble to go through the returns we have put into the case and analyze them, it will appear that 108 barrels is quite as large as the average this year. Some vessels have come out of the gulf with nothing at all, and some with hardly anything at all. In the next place, in order to induce American vessels to go for mackerel to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in any considerable numbers, mackerel must have an active market at remuner ative prices. There must be a different state of things in the United States in that respect from what has existed for many years past, for, by all accounts, the demand has been declining and the consumption has been diminishing for ten years past.

Without stopping to read at length the testimony on that point, there are two or three of the British witnesses who in a short compass state the truth, and to their testimony I wish to call your attention. Mr. Harrington, of Halifax, page 420, says, in answer to the question, "There has not been as much demand for mackerel from the United States for the last five years as formerly?" "Not so great." And in reply to the question, "There must be an abundant supply at home, I suppose?" he says, "I should say so, unless the people are using other articles of food." Mr. Noble, another Halifax witness, page 420, being asked the same question, says, "I think for the past two years the demand for mackerel has been quite as good as before." Mr. Hickson, of Bathurst, is asked this question, "Fresh fish are very rapidly taking the place of salt mackerel in the market, and the importance of salt mackerel and other cured fish is diminishing more and more every year. Is not this the case?" His answer is, "That is my experience in my district." "And owing to the extension of the railroad system and the use of ice-cars, pickled, salt, and smoked fish will steadily become of less consequence ?" "Certainly." Mr. James W. Bigelow, of Wolfville, Nova Scotia, on page 223 of the British evidence, states very emphatically the practical condition of the business. He says, "The same remark applies not only to cod-fishing, but to all branches of the fishery; within the past ten years the consumers have been using fresh instead of salt fish. The salt-fish business on the continent is virtually at an end." He is sorry to say that he states this from practical knowledge of this business. He then goes on to say that fish is supplied to the great markets of the United States "from Gloucester, Portland, and New York; but from Boston principally." "And the fish is sent where?" "To every point West, all over the Union; the fish is principally boxed in ice." Then he goes on to state that if the arrangements of the Treaty of Washington should become permanent, instead of being limited to a term of twelve years, with the new railroad communication with this city that has been al ready opened, the result will be to make Halifax the great fish-business center of the continent; that the vessels will come in here with their fresh fish instead of of going to Gloucester or Boston or New York; that a great business, a great city, will be built up here; and he says that, notwithstanding the treaty is liable to terminate in seven years, he is expecting to put his own money into the business, and es

tablish himself in the fresh-fish business here. Our own witnesses-the witnesses for the United States-have given a fuller and more detailed explanation of this change that has taken place in the markets. It requires no explanation to satisfy any person, with the ordinary organs of taste, that one who can get fresh fish will not eat salt mackerel. Everybody knows that. Crede experto. Our witnesses tell you that fresh fish is sent as far as the Mississippi, and west of the Mississippi, in as great abundance as is to be found on the seaboard. It is just as easy to have fresh fish at Chicago and Saint Louis, and at any of the cities lying on the railroad lines one or two hundred miles west of the Mississippi, as it is to have fresh fish in Boston or Philadelphia. It is only a question of paying the increased price of transportation. Salt fish has to be transported there also, and it costs as much to transport the salt fish as the fresh fish. The result is, that people will not and do not eat salt fish nearly as much as formerly. Then there is a great supply of lake herring -a kind of white-fish-from the northern lakes. The quantity is so great that the statistics of it are almost appalling, although they come from the most authentic sources. This lake herring being sold at the same price as the inferior grades of mackerel-being sold often lower than the cheapest mackerel can be afforded-is taken in preference to it. People find it more agreeable.

At the South, where once there was a large mackerel demand usually, there has grown up an immense mullet business, both fresh and cured, that has taken the place of salt mackerel there. And so it has come to pass that there is a very limited demand in a few 1 rge hotels for that kind of salt mackerel which is the best, the No. 1 fat mackerel—a demand that would not take up, at the usual price in the market, $20 a barrel, more than from five to ten thousand barrels all over the country, while, if you go down to the poorer grades of mackerel, few will buy them until they get as low as from $7 to $8 a barrel. I am not going over the testimony of Proctor, Pew, Sylvanus Smith, and our other witnesses on this subject, because what they have said must be fresh in the minds of all of you. It comes to this: people will not eat the mackerel unless they can buy it at a very low price. It comes into competition, not with other kinds of fish alone, but with every description of cheap food, and its price can never be raised above the average price of other staples in the market of equivalent food-value.

If it is to be impossible to dispose of considerable quantities of these fish until the price is brought down to about $8 a barrel on the average, what inducement will there be to come, at great expense, to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, to have such results as for years past have followed from voyages here? The truth, gentlemen, is simply this: whether it is a privilege to you not to see United States vessels here, or whether their presence here has some incidental benefit connected with it, you are going to find for years to come that they will not be here. The people in the Strait of Canso who want to sell them supplies, will find them not there to buy supplies, and the unhappy fishermen who suffer so much from having them in the neighborhood of the island will be exempt from all such evil consequences hereafter. Once in two or three years, if there appears to be a chance of a great supply here, and if there happens to be a great failure on our own coast, a few of our vessels will run up in midsummer to try the experiment. But as to a large fleet of United States vessels fishing for mackerel in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, there is no immediate prospect that such will ever be the cuse. Forty years ago fishing for mackerel died out in the Bay of FunJy. According to the witnesses many years ago mackerel were ex

tremely abundant in the waters in the vicinity around Newfoundland. They have disappeared from all of those places, thongh, strange to sa y one schooner did get a trip of mackerel in a Newfoundland bay this summer, off the French coast, so that we are not obliged to pay for it in the award of this Commission; it was in waters where we had a right to fish before the Treaty of Washington. But this business, notoriously precarious, where no man can foretell the results of a voyage, or the results of a season, will pretty much pass away, so far as it is pursued by United States vessels. They will run out on our own coast; they will catch what they can and carry them to market fresh, and what cannot be sold fresh they will pickle. They will, when prospects are good, make occasional voyages here, but as for coming in great numbers, there is no probability that they will ever do it again. Our friends in Nova Scotia and upon the island are going to have the local fishery to themselves; I hope that it will prove profitable to them; I have no doubt it will prove reasonably profitable to them, because they, living on the coast, at home, can pursue it under greater advantages than the men of Massachusetts can. They are very welcome to all the profits they are to make out of it, and they are very welcome, if they are not ungenerous in their exactions from us, to all the advantages they derive from sending the fish that they take in their boats or vessels in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island to our markets, all they can make by selling them there. I am sure no one will grudge them.

I come now to a branch of this case which it seems to me ought to decide it, whatever valuation, however extreme, may be put upon the quantity of mackerel caught by our vessels in the territorial waters of the provinces. I mean the duty question; the value of the remission of duties in the markets of the United States to the people of the Domin ion. We have laid the statistics before you, and we find that in 1874 there was $335,181 saved upon mackerel and herring, and $20,000 more saved upon fish-oil. There was, therefore, $355,972 saved in 1874. In 1875 there was a saving of $375,991 and some cents; in 1876, $353,242. I get these figures by adding to the results of table No. 4, which shows the importation of fish, the results of table No. 10, which shows the fish oil. The statistics are Mr. Hill's. In table No. 5 you will find the quantities of mackerel and herring. The dutiable value of mackerel was two dollars a barrel; of herring, one dollar a barrel, and of smoked herring, five cents a box.

We are met here with the statement that the consumer pays the du ties; and our friends on the other side seem to think that there is a law of political economy as inexorable as the law of gravitation, according to which, when a man has produced a particular article which he offers for sale, and a tax is imposed on that article, he is sure to get enough more out of the man to whom he sells the article to reimburse the tax. That is the theory, and we have heard it from their witnesses-"the consumer pays the duties"—as if they had been trained in it as an adage of political economy. But, gentlemen, I should not be afraid to discuss that question as applicable to mackerel and herring and the cured fish that come from the Dominion of Canada into the United States before any school of political economists that ever existed in the world. I do not care with what principles you start, principles of free trade or principles of protection, it seems to me that it can be proved to demonstra tion that this is a case where the duties fall upon those who catch the fish in the Dominion, and not upon the people of the United States who bay and eat them. The very treaty under which you are acting requires you to have regard to the value of the free market, ordains that in mak

ing up your award you shall take it into account. And are you, upon any theories of political economy, to disregard what the treaty says you shall have regard to? Why, nobody ever heard the proposition advanced, until we came here to try this case, that free access to the markets of the United States was anything but a most enormous advantage to the people of these provinces.

Let us look at the history of the negotiations between the two gov ernments on the subject. As early as 1845 (some years before the negotiations with reference to the Reciprocity Treaty), when the Earl of Aberdeen announced to Mr. Everett, as a matter of great liberality, that our fishermen were no longer to be driven out of the Bay of Fundy, he went on to say that, in communicating the liberal intentions of Her Majesty's Government, he desired to call Mr. Everett's attention to the fact that the produce of the labor of the British colonial fishermen was at the present moment excluded, by prohibitory duties on the part of the United States, from the markets of that country; and he submitted that the moment when the British Government made a liberal conces sion to the United States might well be deemed favorable for a kindred concession on the part of the United States to the British trade, by a reduction of the duties which operated so prejudicially to the interests of British colonial fishermen. That was the view of the home government long before any reciprocity treaty had been agitated, thirty-two years ago. The letter of Lord Aberdeen bears date March 10, 1845.

In 1850, a communication took place between Mr. Everett, then Secretary of State, through the British minister at Washington, in which Lord Elgin made the offer to which I referred in my Case, which I then understood to be an unequivocal offer to exchange free fish for free fishing, without regard to other trade relations. I found that, so far as that particular letter went, I was in error, and corrected the error. Sub. sequently, I found that Mr. Everett himself, two years later, had the same impression, for in a letter that he wrote, as Secretary of State, to the President, in 1853, before the Reciprocity Treaty, he says:

It has been perceived with satisfaction that the Government of Her Britannic Majesty is prepared to enter into an arrangement for the admission of the fishing-vessels of the United States to a full participation in the public fisheries on the coasts and shores of the provinces (with the exception, perhaps, at present, of Newfoundland), and in the right of drying and curing fish on shore, on condition of the admission duty free into the markets of the United States of the products of the colonial fisheries; similar privileges, on the like condition, to be reciprocally enjoyed by British subjects on the coasts and shores of the United States. Such an arrangement, the Secretary has reason to believe, would be acceptable to the fishing interests of the United States. (Thirty-second Congress, second session, Senate Ex. Ďoc. 34.)

The latter part of that letter contains a reference to general reciprocity, and shows the anxiety of the British authorities to have more extensive reciprocal arrangements made.

Mr. KELLOGG. What is the date of Lord Elgin's letter?

Mr. FOSTER. The letter of Lord Elgin is dated June 24, 1851. The letter which I just read from Mr. Everett to the President was in 1853. So that it seems that Mr. Everett then understood, as I did, that the offer was a specific one, and that the Government of Great Britain was at that time disposed to exchange the right of inshore fishing for the admission of fish into the United States duty free. It is not particularly important, at a date so remote, how the fact really was. I refer to it only to show the great importance attached at that early day-an importance which has continued to be attached from that time to the present-by the home government as well as the colonial government, to free access to the markets of the United States.

Coming down to the date of the Reciprocity Treaty, we find in every direction, whatever public document we refer to of any of the provinces, the same story told: That during the Reciprocity Treaty, they built up a great fish business, unknown to them before; that at the end of the Reciprocity Treaty, a duty of two dollars a barrel on mackerel, and one dollar a barrel on herring, excluded them from the markets of the United States and crushed out that branch of industry. At the risk of making myself tedious, I must read you some passages on that subject. Here is what Mr. Peter Mitchell, the former minister of marine and fisheries, says, in 1869, in his "Return of all licenses granted to American fishermen," printed by order of Parliament, at Ottawa:

These excessive duties bear with peculiar hardship on our fishing industry, and particularly that of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island-the fishermen and dealers in those provinces being forced into competition, in United States markets, under serious disadvantages, side by side with the American free catch taken out of our own waters. Yes, "taken out of their own waters." I am not afraid of the words. If the consumer pays the duties, it would not make any difference out of what waters the fish were taken, which brought on competition, would it? I am discussing now the proposition that there is a law of political economy, of universal application, and particularly applicable to the mackerel which go from the provinces to Boston, by which whatever tax is imposed in the United States is forth with added to the price and has to be paid by the man who eats the mackerel in the States, and it makes no difference where the competition arises from. Mr. Mitchell's statement, therefore, is absolutely to the purpose. He continues:

At the same time, other producers are subject to equally heavy charges on the agricultural, mineral, and other natural products of the United Provinces.

The direct extent to which such prohibitory duties affect the fishery interests of these provinces may be stated in a few words. During the year 1866, for example, the several provinces have paid in gold, as custom duty on provincial-caught fish exported to the United States, about $220,000.

This amount was paid by the provinces in 1866, the year after the Reciprocity Treaty ended. Then, in a note, he says:

More forcibly to illustrate the unequal operation of the present system, suffice it to instance the following cases: A British vessel of 71 tons, built and equipped last season at St. John, N. B., costing $4,800, expressly for the mackerel fishery in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Bay of Chaleurs, took 600 barrels of fisn, which sold in Halifax and Boston for $6,000. After paying expenses (including $9.86 in gold for customs) a profit of $1,200 accrued to the owners. An American vessel from Newburyport, Mass., of 46 tons burden, took a license at Port Mulgrave, N. S., paying $46. The whole cost of vessel and voyage was $3,200 or $2,400, Halifax currency. She fished 910 barrels of mackerel, which sold in Boston for $13,000, about $9,110 in gold, leaving a profit of $6,710.

After speaking of the question of raising the license fee to higher fig. ures, Mr. Mitchell continues (p. 6):

It is recommended that the rate be $2 per ton, the mackerel fishery being that in which Americans chiefly engage, and as mackerel is the principal fish marketed in the United States by Canadians, on which the tax is $2 per barrel, this rate amounts to a charge of but 20 cents per barrel, still leaving them an advantage of $1.80 on each barrel, besides the drawback allowed on salt.

Did Mr. Peter Mitchell think that the $2 a barrel duty was got back by the fishermen of the provinces? During the session of the Joint High Commission at Washington, when the American Commissioners made an offer to purchase the inshore fisheries in perpetuity, which was not coupled with any offer of free admission to our markets, the British Commissioners replied "that the offer was, as they thought, wholly inadequate, and that no arrangement would be acceptable of which the admission into the United States, free of duty, of fish, the production