If, on looking back, I were to select the things which I have done in public life in which I take the most satisfaction, they would be, the speech in the Senate on the Fisheries Treaty, July 10, 1886, the letter denouncing the A. P. A., a secret, political association, organized for the purpose of ostracizing our Catholic fellow-citizens, and the numerous speeches, letters and magazine articles against the subjugation of the Philippine Islands.
I do not think any one argument, certainly that my argument, caused the defeat of the Fisheries Treaty, negotiated by Mr. Joseph Chamberlain and Mr. Bayard during Mr. Cleveland's first Administration. The argument against it was too strong not to have prevailed without any one man's contribution to it; and the Senate was not so strongly inclined to support President Cleveland as to give a two-thirds majority to a measure, unless it seemed clearly for the public interest. He had his Republican opponents to reckon with, and the Democrats in the Senate disliked him very much, and gave him a feeble and half-hearted support.
The question of our New England fisheries has interested the people of the country, especially of New England, from our very early history. Burke spoke of them before the Revolutionary War, as exciting even then the envy of England. One of the best known and most eloquent passages in all literature is his description of the enterprise of our fathers. Burke adds to that description:
"When I reflect upon the effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride of power sink, and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances melt and die away within me. My rigor relents. I pardon something to the spirit of Liberty."
The War of the Revolution, of course, interrupted for a time the fisheries of the American colonies. But the fishermen were not idle. They manned the little Navy whose exploits have never yet received from history its due meed of praise. They furnished the ships' companies of Manly and Tucker and Biddle and Abraham Whipple. They helped Paul Jones to strike terror into St. George's Channel. In 1776, in the first year of the Revolutionary War, American privateers, most of them manned by our fishermen, captured three hundred and forty- two British vessels.
The fisheries came up again after the war. Mr. Jefferson commended them to the favor of the nation in an elaborate and admirable report. He said that before the war 8,000 men and 52,000 tons of shipping were annually employed by Massachusetts in the cod and whale fisheries. England and France made urgent efforts and offered large bounties to get our fishermen to move over there.
For a long time the fisheries were aided by direct bounties.
Later the policy of protection has been substituted.
John Adams has left on record that when he went abroad as our representative in 1778, and again when the Treaty of 1783 was negotiated, his knowledge of the fisheries and his sense of their importance were what induced him to take the mission. He declared that unless our claims were fully recognized, the States would carry on the war alone. He said:
"Because the people of New England, besides the natural claim of mankind to the gifts of Providence on their coast, are specially entitled to the fishery by their charters, which have never been declared forfeited."
In the debate on the articles of peace in the House of Lords,
Lord Loughborough, the ablest lawyer of his party, said: