Opinion of a Newfoundland Judge on the Fisheries Question: Mr. Justice Pinsent, who, as a Judge of the Supreme Court of Newfoundland, has had special cognisance of the Fisheries dispute, sends a long letter to the Standard, in which he reviews and explains the legal aspects of the question. The treaties, he says, are unquestionably a great misfortune for Newfoundland. They are utterly unsuited to the conditions of the present day, and their satisfactory working in their present form is impracticable. Nevertheless they exist. The difficulty (Mr. Justice Pinsent continues) has to be met under any circumstances, either by compensation in the form of purchase or exchange (which France is unlikely to accept, seeing that the main raison d’etre of its Newfoundland connection is the maintenance of a naval nursery), or by the adoption of the most sensible practical working agreement of which the circumstances will admit. The treaties are of that disabling character which should, no doubt, subject them to the strictest construction as against foreign I claims in derogation of the rights of the sovereign proprietors; and if this new claim to prosecute the lobster business, which has become a valuable industry, cannot be supported, there ought to be no hesitation in preventing it on the part of the French, and in securing its peaceable and profitable pursuit to the British trader and fisherman, to whom present impediments in other respects are already so great a hardship. In justice to both French and English subjects on the coast, be it said that great credit is due for the forbearance and avoidance of violent measures which have, on the whole, marked the history of this embarrassing and anomalous international arrangement.
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Referenced
GRO0747 Hennock: Robert John Pinsent: 1834 – 1893