d in the negotiation of a treaty as above authorized. After many
conferences and protracted efforts an agreement has at length been
arrived at, which is embodied in the treaty which I now lay before you.

The treaty meets my approval, because I believe that it supplies a
satisfactory, practical, and final adjustment, upon a basis honorable
and just to both parties, of the difficult and vexed question to which
it relates.

A review of the history of this question will show that all former
attempts to arrive at a common interpretation, satisfactory to both
parties, of the first article of the treaty of October 20, 1818, have
been unsuccessful, and with the lapse of time the difficulty and
obscurity have only increased.

The negotiations in 1854 and again in 1871 ended in both cases in
temporary reciprocal arrangements of the tariffs of Canada and
Newfoundland and of the United States, and the payment of a money award
by the United States, under which the real questions in difference
remained unsettled, in abeyance, and ready to present themselves anew
just so soon as the conventional arrangements were abrogated.

The situation, therefore, remained unimproved by the results of the
treaty of 1871, and a grave condition of affairs, presenting almost
identically the same features and causes of complaint by the United
States against Canadian action and British default in its correction,
confronted us in May, 1886, and has continued until the present time.

The greater part of the correspondence which has taken place between the
two Governments has heretofore been communicated to Congress, and at as
early a day as possible I shall transmit the remaining portion to this
date, accompanying it with the joint protocols of the conferences which
resulted in the conclusion of the treaty now submitted to you.

You will thus be fully possessed of the record and history of the case
since the termination on June 30, 1885, of the fishery articles of the
treaty of Washington of 1871, whereby we were relegated to the
provisions of the treaty of October 20, 1818.

As the documents and papers referred to will supply full information of
the positions taken under my Administration by the representatives of
the United States, as well as those occupied by the representatives of
the Government of Great Britain, it is not considered necessary or
expedient to repeat them in this message. But I believe the treaty will
be found to contain a just