of his contemporaries. It was his fate to deal chiefly in
controversy with those accomplished diplomats, Lord Salisbury and
Lord Granville, and it must have been among the relaxations of
their office to point out tactfully the defects and errors in his
dispatches. Nevertheless when he did not misread history or
misquote precedents but wielded the broadsword of equity, he
often caught the public conscience, and then he was not an
opponent to be despised.

Blaine at once undertook the defense of the contention that
Bering Sea was "closed" and the exclusive property of the United
States, in spite of the fact that this position was opposed to
the whole trend of American opinion, which from the days of the
Revolution had always stood for freedom of the high seas and the
limitation of the water rights of particular nations to the
narrowest limits. The United States and Great Britain had
jointly protested against the Czar's ukase of 1821, which had
asserted Russia's claim to Bering Sea as territorial waters; and
if Russia had not possessed it in 1821, we certainly could not
have bought it in 1867. In the face of Canadian opinion, Great
Britain could never consent, even for the sake of peace, to a
position as unsound as it was disadvantageous to Canadian
industry. Nor did Blaine's contention that the seals were
domestic animals belonging to us, and therefore subject to our
protection while wandering through the ocean, carry conviction to
lawyers familiar with the fascinating intricacies of the law,
domestic and international, relating to migratory birds and
beasts. To the present generation it seems amusing that Blaine
defended his basic contention quite as much on the ground of the
inhumanity of destroying the seals as of its economic