Sir EDWARD CARSON. Another example that I might give:

Cet inconnu

* avait erré quelque temps dans le milieu de l'île, montant sur le sommet de tous les rochers.

That is a quotation from Fénelon which was given to me. It is the same idea, but it is not worth while pursuing it further. It can easily be decided among a number of French people.

Now, I say the Treaty gives you here all the guidance you need, but if you are to refer to the negotiations, I say you find there abundantly that we are right in the way we draw this, as being nearest the coast in a parallel direction, situées parallèlement à la côte." Those words are in the Treaty.

The PRESIDENT. Article IV.

66

Sir EDWARD CARSON. But in the negotiations themselves you will find this over and over again. They have been referred to, you will find," qui bordent la côte." You will find "une très petite distance." You will find the words "nearest the sea." You will find "closely bordering." You will find the "seaward base."

Mr. TURNER. I wish you would identify that expression "nearest the sea "; I do not remember that nearest the sea.'

66

Mr. AYLESWORTH. That occurs in Mr. Canning's letter on p. 85, at the foot of the page, the last line but one.

Sir EDWARD CARSON. Yes, it is in Mr. Canning's letter to Sir Charles Bagot, p. 85:

The line drawn from the southernmost point of Prince of Wales Island from south to north through Portland Channel, till it strikes the mainland in latitude 56 degrees, thence following the sinuosities of the coast, along the base of the mountains nearest the sea to Mount Elias, and thence along the 139th degree of longitude to the Polar Sea.

Mr. ROOT. He explains that in the same letter over the page on p. 86 as meaning the seaward base.

620

Sir EDWARD CARSON. Yes, the seaward base.

Mr. Root. It is the base nearest the sea, not the mountains nearest the sea.

Sir EDWARD CARSON. No, I do not think that is meant to be the explanation. He says there are two points to be settled

in fixing the course of the eastern boundary of the strip of land to be occupied by Russia on the coast. The seaward base of the mountains is assumed as that limit.

Mr. Root. That is the same thing that he referred to.

Sir EDWARD CARSON. "This is done by a proviso that the line shall in no case (i. e., not in that of the mountains, which appear by the map almost to border the coast, turning out to be far removed from it) be carried further to the east than a specified number of leagues from the sea."

After all, what is the seaward base of any mountain? You do not talk of the seaward base of mountains when you come 35 miles in because you see the side towards the sea.

Mr. Roor. It is the base opposite the landward base.

Sir EDWARD CARSON. Well, then, you might take a mountain anywhere inland, and, having ascertained that the one side of it, if you went far enough, went to the sea, call it the seaward base, but I ask you to take the two things together, which is really the fair way to do

S. Doc. 162, 58-2, vol 7—14

it; he quotes the mountains nearest the sea, and then he talks of seaward base, and I do not think that, taking the two together, you have any difficulty.

The PRESIDENT. You are rather doing what you criticized Mr. Watson for doing, going back to the negotiations instead of the Treaty. Sir EDWARD CARSON. No, my Lord, I purposely pointed out

The PRESIDENT. What I meant to point out is that at the time of the Treaty and immediately afterwards they speak of it as the mountains bordering on the coast; that is better than all the rest put together.

Sir EDWARD CARSON. That is better than all the rest put together, but, my Lord, I prefaced my observations upon going back on this by saying there it was in the Treaty.

The PRESIDENT. Yes.

Sir EDWARD CARSON. And I say in relation to it if you want more, and I am not calling it to bring anything new into the Treaty, that there it is; that the Treaty points out exactly the same thing as the negotiations, and I say that in drawing any line, and this is a justification for Mr. King's line here, it is impossible to draw one except taking the mountains nearest the sea. You will get into any amount of trouble and difficulty in drawing it and making an impossible line, not the Treaty line at all; if you do anything, take the seaward mountains. Now, my Lord, I shall be proceeding to consider the question of coast.

The PRESIDENT. Will you be able to conclude to-morrow, Mr. Solicitor?

Sir EDWARD CARSON. I am not certain, my Lord.

621

The PRESIDENT. You will do your best.
Sir EDWARD CARSON. I will do my best.

The PRESIDENT. We will sit later if necessary.

Sir EDWARD CARSON. No one is more anxious to conclude than I am.

The PRESIDENT. We know, Mr. Solicitor, and we will sit later, if necessary, to-morrow.

(Adjourned till to-morrow at 11 a. m.)

622

FIFTEENTH DAY.-FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 1903.

All the Members of the Tribunal were present.

Sir EDWARD CARSON. My Lord, I was last night going to pass on to the consideration of the Treaty, in relation to the coast, that we

have to examine here.

My Lord, before I do that I would like to make one remark; I did remark it with reference to another matter yesterday, and that is to ask the Tribunal to bear in mind that it is not merely the mountains that were parallel to the coast, as I said yesterday, but they were drawing a line along the mountains which were parallel to the coast. I said that yesterday in relation to Mr. King's line and in support of it, but I wish to apply the observation in another way; also, that it gives an indication, at least I suggest to the Tribunal that it gives an indication, that there is no reason in the world, if you thought there was the line of mountains coming along to the inlets and then the mountains going along upon the other side, there is no reason why you should not draw the line across. Of course, there may be differences in different places, but I shall take, for instance, just to apply my point, a very narrow inlet, a very narrow indentation in the coast going a long way in, as I say that the Treaty itself allows you to do; in that case you may draw a line across the inlet, if you find the summit of the mountains which you require on each side; and, if I am right in that, that I think is an additional argument why you cannot answer the fifth question in the affirmative, because, as the place was unsurveyed and it was entirely unknown to what extent these inlets would run and what was the exact configuration of them, it would be impossible to say that, no matter how narrow or how long the inlet might be, you were not to do what the Treaty enables you to do-draw a line across from one mountain to the other.

My Lord, I pass on now to the question of coast in the Treaty. Now, let me say here in approaching that we must, as Mr. Watson says, put ourselves in the position of the negotiators. There is no use attempting to find out what the negotiators meant by that, by taking the rights as they exist after the Treaty. You must take it as the rights exist after the Treaty was negotiated, and that was one of the reasons why I took up so much time yesterday in attempting to disprove and I think I disproved it satisfactorily-the allegation of Mr. Watson that Russia was ever the owner of the mainland coast on which what is now called the lisière is situated, and it seems to me that that consideration puts an end entirely to the whole basis of Mr. Taylor's argument that he put forward here. At the same time, with great respect to Mr. Taylor, who is one of the most eminent authorities on international law-I quite freely and frankly admit it—I

decline entirely to be bound by this, that, when you come to see what was meant by the negotiators of the Treaty, you are to suppose they at every moment at which they were framing the Treaty, bandied the proposals from one to the other, using language and phrases which may have a certain meaning amongst publicists such as Mr. Taylor, that they had at their elbow some gentleman equally eminent with Mr. Taylor, explaining to them that there only existed, to the knowledge of writers on international law, two kinds of coast, namely, the political coast and the physical coast. And you ought to bear in mind that, as the political coast is something imposed or superadded to the physical coast, if you cannot get a political coast you can get no trend of the coast within the meaning of the phrase that is used in the documents.

I do not know whether your Lordship really follows the way in which Mr. Taylor pressed that. He makes the meaning at all events perfectly clear in the passage at p. 551 in which he says:

623

If there is no reason for it, is there any authority for it? I respectfully call upon the Representatives of Great Britain to go, if they can, and search the international jurisprudence of the world—

Well, my Lord, I have not done that since Mr. Taylor's speech, and I think I shall show you why I have not asked you for an adjournment to do that-

international jurisprudence of the world and see if they can prove from the treatise of any publicist in any nation that anybody has ever put into any book anything in the way of authority for the proposition that a political coast line can exist back of a political coast line.

I have already said that does not arise here at all, because at the time the mainland was not the possession of Russia, and the mainland must have had a political coast, if you can define what a political coast really means.

I say that it is absolutely impossible, upon the basis of reason or authority. to establish or to give any colour to the idea that such things exist. It cannot exist under the existing principles of international law.

If that is true, the only coast line that can take the general trend of the coast is the political coast line. Then that interior coast line is a physical coast line, and has the character and attributes of a physical coast line which exists for the purpose of a boundary merely. There can be no conflict there of precedent authority. A physical coast line is made by the hand of Nature where the salt water touches the land, and that is the explanation of the word "sinuosities."

If Mr. Taylor puts it in that way, I should have liked him to go on to explain how he can draw his line parallel to the sinuosities. If the conclusion of his argument is that you are driven to nothing but. the sinuosities, and that he makes out of Article IV something different in the parallelism from what there is in Article III, I really think his line must fail altogether.

Then he goes on :—

A physical coast line is made by the hand of Nature where the salt water touches the land, and that is the explanation of the word "sinuosities"; it was to indicate that these people were dealing with a question of boundary; they were not dealing with a political coast line for the purpose of jurisdiction; they were dealing with a physical coast line, as Rivier says, for the purpose of barrer. Therefore, as the physical coast line must follow the marks put upon it by the hand of Nature, the physical coast line follows the sinuosities as Nature made them, and when you put the political coast line out here [indicating on the map] it is impossible to have it there.

The whole confused and fundamental misconception upon which this whole British line is based is that you can run a political coast line in here. And there you have a positive demonstration. To talk about a line going across Lynn Canal, whether it is 6 miles or 10 miles, becomes empty jargon unless it is a political coast line, for no other coast line can go across the head of a bay or inlet, and all this is unintelligible jargon in conflict with the very fundamentals of international law. And it is upon that fundamental confusion, the idea that there is a trend of the coast of which international law knows nothing. There can be no trend of a coast except the trend where the political coast line is. If that be true, then the conclusion is irresistible that the coastand there is no use in our confusing ourselves by the word 'ocean." The primary inquiry is: What is the coast? That is the technical question to be defined, and "coast" is where the salt water touches the land.

Now, my Lord, if it was necessary for me to argue in the way Mr. Taylor has argued, all I can say is, I think I could devote considerable time in pointing out that as there was a political coast, because the mainland had then a political coast, and as there was a political coast, as the coast did not belong to Russia, and as, if I take Mr. Taylor seriously in saying, that there can be only a general trend to the political coast, all I can say is, that for the twenty or thirty years for which this matter has been debated between the Parties, I could bring abundant evidence that everybody had admitted that there was a general trend of the coast, and if that general trend could only exist in relation to a political coast, and if that political coast would, according to the assumption of Mr. Taylor, cross the Lynn Canal, I think I could base a very good argument to show that, upon Mr. Taylor's own showing, the general trend of the coast would go in the way in which I have marked it out.

624

But, my Lord, I protest against reading these twisted views of the writers upon international law into a Treaty of this kind, which was not dealing with these questions in the way in which these particular matters of political coasts are worked by writers upon international law, but was using plain language, the language of the negotiators, which they themselves perfectly well understood without going into these refined distinctions of writers on international law.

Now, my Lord, what is the effect of what Mr. Taylor asks you to do, Having satisfied himself that there is no political coast, and that there can only be the general trend of a political coast and that, therefore, there can be no general trend here, having satisfied himself of that he comes to a perfectly satisfactory conclusion, and he says you may discard the word "ocean" altogether. That is the result of the whole thing; you may discard the word "ocean" altogether. That is, of course, what he is leading up to in his argument, just as Mr. Watson said that the moment you read the map into the Treaty, he was able to tell you the exact line of Vancouver or Faden, that the negatiators had on the map. He said the whole thing was perfectly simple. All you had to do was to draw your line here; you were not bothered with ocean or "trend of the coast" or anything else; and so here Mr. Taylor says:

66

Just blot out coast; you have come to the conclusion there is no political coast; blot it out; and then the whole matter is absolutely simple, and you decide the question that way.

My Lord, that will not do; you have to go to the language of the Treaty, the language in its plain ordinary sense, and you have to try to see what is meant here by coast.