y further rights in our markets. Fresh fish,
including frozen and slack-salted, was already free in our ports,
competing sharply with our own catch. No one longer cared to fish
inside, or, except in emergencies, to provision at Canadian towns.
Convenient as would be the power to obtain bait near the fishing-grounds
and to trans-ship fish home in bond, neither was indispensable. Cod are
still caught with trawls and baited hooks. The best bait is squid, whose
abundance upon the Banks is what causes the cod so to frequent them. The
squid can be had freshest as well as cheapest from the peasantry of the
Newfoundland and Nova Scotia coasts; but clams carried from home were
found to do nearly as well. They would remain fresh better than squid,
but got off the hooks more easily. Accordingly, few collisions occurred
in 1888, and as the season of that year closed there was prospect that,
even without a new convention, no necessity for American retaliation
would arise.

[1892]

This chapter shall close with a word touching the Alaska fisheries
question, which, fortunately, had advanced a good step. In 1870 the
United States leased the Pribylov, or Seal Islands off Alaska, to the
Alaska Commercial Co. Pressed by this company, which naturally wished
the completest possible monopoly of seal-fishing, our Government
foolishly affected to treat the entire Behring Sea as a mare clausum,
belonging to the United States. Several British craft engaged in taking
seals were seized by United States vessels considerably more than three
miles from land. Great Britain of course protesting, a treaty, ratified
in March, 1892, submitted to arbitration the question between the two
governments. Seven arbitrators sat, two from the United States, Justice
Harlan and Senator Morgan, and one each from Canada, Great Britain,
Sweden, France, and Italy. This Board decided against the American
contention, denying the right of the United States to assume the
protection of seals or any property in them outside the ordinary
three-mile limit. Happy provisions were, however, made for a joint
police of Behring Sea by the two nations, for an open and a closed
fishing season, and for the careful licensing of sealing vessels.

CHAPTER IV.

THE SOUTH

[1886-1870]

It cannot be denied that the radical method of reconstruction resorted
to by Congress occasioned dreadful evils. Among other things it ignored
the natural prejudices of the whites, many of whom wer