question. If there were no American tariff the fisheries question would not exist. As it is, the New England fishermen have a grievance against Canada with respect to the conditions under which they are permitted to use the ports of the Maritime Provinces, and the fishermen of the Maritime Provinces on their part complain of the high duties of the Dingley tariff. Canada has long been willing to grant the New England fishermen free fishing and the free use of the Canadian ports in return for the free entry into the United States of fish caught by Canadian fishermen. But the New England fishermen, ог rather the interests. at Gloucester which control the New England fisheries, will concede nothing on the tariff, and they insist that, because Canada will not open her ports without let or hindrance to them, they have a grievance against the Dominion. In short, they want all the advantages that Canadian fishermen enjoy, and also insist on holding to all the advantages which they enjoy under the tariff as American citizens.

In the absence of any later treaty, all that American fishermen are entitled to under the treaty of 1818 is the use of Canadian ports for repairs and shelter, and to obtain wood and water. Since 1888, by the generosity of Canada, they have been conceded more valuable privileges. Under a modus vivendi sanctioned by the Canadian Parliament and continued from year to year, New England fishermen, while still kept beyond the three-mile limit when fishing, are permitted to go into Canadian ports to obtain bait, ice and supplies; to ship crews, and to transship their catches in bond through Canadian territory into the United States. Through this transshipment privilege, New England fishermen are saved dead-horse voyages to and from the fishing grounds. All that Canada gets in return for these concessions is a small license fee from the owners of American vessels thus using Canadian ports.

For ten years New England fishermen have enjoyed these privileges without any other recompense to Canada, and from the time they defeated the Chamberlain treaty of 1888 they have stood out against any concessions in the tariff to Canadian fishermen.

Inland from the Atlantic coast, along the border line, arise three questions which are a source of irritation to Canada. tation to Canada. The first arises out of the United States contract labor laws; the second, out of the lumber schedule of the Dingley tariff of 1897; and the third out of the lack of laws or the non-observance of laws in the states bordering on the lakes with respect to fishing.

The United States alien contract labor laws are supposed to be general in their application. In travelling to and from Ottawa and Montreal, and also from Halifax, I have frequently made inquiries as to whether these laws were enforced on the New England border line, and have never been able to discover any proof that they are enforced against Canadians coming into New England from the Maritime Provinces and from the Province of Quebec. Farther west, unfortunately, there is no lack of proof of the harsh way in which the alien contract labor laws of 1885 and 1887 are enforced against Canadians from the Province of Ontario. Since the Joint High Commission was created in 1898 there has been some relaxation of the laws against Canadians in this length of the American border line; but before that time, instances of their frequent application were recorded in the Toronto and Montreal newspapers. It was then hardly possible to read these newspapers for a week without coming across paragraphs like these two, taken from the Montreal Witness of the dates named in 1897:

"Barrie, Ontario, March 12th. Frank King left here a few days ago for Detroit, where he had accepted a position as photographer's apprentice with Charles

Sergeant. When he was entering, the customs officers searched his trunk, and asked him what he was going to do there. King told the officers, whereupon he was told that he could not go. He left his trunk in Windsor, and in a day or two was about to make a second attempt to enter, when the officers told him if he came again they would arrest him. A man who left here to accept a position in Buffalo as book-keeper, a few days ago, is in the same position."

"Kingston, Ontario, April 5th. Here is a case of the application of the Alien Labour law. Mr. Dexter Pyke of Portsmouth was employed on the steamer Nichols, in command of Capt. Hinckley. Last week the authorities at Cape Vincent, New York, ordered his dismissal from the boat as he was not an American citizen, and Mr. Pyke was accordingly discharged. The steamer Nichols is owned in Cape Vincent."

Taken generally, the cases of this kind which appeared so frequently in the Toronto and Montreal newspapers until the Joint High Commission began its work showed that the contract labor law inspectors on the American border line were permitted to put the widest interpretation on the law and to bring within its provisions not only men and women who had made engagements to work in the United States before leaving Canada, but also men and women who were crossing the border to look for work. So wide has been the interpretation of the laws that men crossing by train or boat have been compelled to open their travelling bags in order that from an overhauling of their contents the American inspectors might satisfy themselves whether these Canadians were coming into the United States to seek work or were merely on a visit. When the inspectors were convinced that the Canadians were seeking work, they were promptly deported across the border and threatened with the penalties of the alien labor laws if they again attempted to cross into the United States. Young women from Canada have been refused admission to the United States to serve as nurse pupils at the Buffalo hospitals; and even nurses coming

from Canada to attend cases on the American side of the border line have been turned back.

For nearly eleven years Canada put up with these American labor laws and the drastic manner in which they were enforced, without passing any laws in retaliation. At last, in 1897, after the methods of enforcing the American laws had been investigated by a parliamentary committee at Ottawa, and their hardships to Canadians adequately proved, the Dominion Parliament passed a Canadian alien labor law. But then, as in the

1899 session of the Canadian Parliament, Sir Wilfrid Laurier urged Canadians to be patient and not to permit themselves to be moved to any unneighborly action by any feeling of irritation. The Canadian law of 1897 did not originate with the government. At the beginning of the session two private members from the border counties of Ontario, one a Conservative, and the other a supporter of the Liberal government, introduced alien labor laws framed as nearly as was practicable on the existing American laws. The sentiment in Parliament was then so strong that the government dared not undertake to move the rejection of these bills. One of them was permitted to pass; but the government inserted a clause which prevented the act from becoming general in its operation, and which provided that it should go into force by orders in council and only in those parts of Canada which were suffering from the operation of the American laws.

Since 1897 the law has been put into force only in two or three places. There have been no deportments across the border under its provisions; and in 1897, after it was known that there was to be a Joint Commission for the settlement of this and other questions outstanding between the two countries, Sir Wilfrid Laurier announced in the House of Commons that he hoped, as one of the results of the Commission, that Canada would

soon have no further use for its alien labor law. With regard to this matter, Sir Wilfrid Laurier and the Ottawa government have undoubtedly acted in accordance with the spirit of the speech from which the extract at the outset of this article was taken, and they have not permitted the disturbing irritation on the Ontario border, due to the action of the United States labor law inspectors, to push Canada into any serious reprisals.

For six months past there has been a great outcry in the United States against Canada because of the Ontario log embargo. When this question is examined it will be seen that the fault is not all on the Canadian side of the border, and that the provocation has come from this side of the line. Under the McKinley act of 1890 there was duty of one dollar a thousand feet on Canadian sawn lumber. Under the Wilson tariff, from 1894 to 1897, lumber was treated as raw material, and was admitted into the United States duty free. This arrangement did not suit the Michigan lumber men. While the presidential campaign of 1896 was proceeding, they obtained a specific pledge from Mr. McKinley and the Republicans that high duties should again be imposed on Canadian lumber; and when the tariff was under revision in the early months of 1897, these Michigan lumber men obtained the insertion of a schedule by which the duty was fixed at two dollars-twice the duty that sufficed during the McKinley tariff of 1890 to 1894. Between 1890 and 1897, however, the conditions of the lumber trade in Michigan had undergone an important change. Supplies of pine logs in Michigan had begun to run short; and to keep their mills going the Michigan lumbermen for two or three years prior to 1897 had been importing saw-logs in increasing quantities from Ontario. When they secured the two-dollar duty on Canadian lumber in 1897 they were consequently in some apprehen

sion about the continuance of the supply of logs from the Canadian side of the lakes. They were afraid that the Dominion government might impose an export duty on these logs, or that the Ontario government, which owns the Crown lands from which logs are cut, might impose extra Crown dues. The Michigan lumbermen were quite aware that by the imposition of the two-dollar duty they had hit one of the chief industries of Canada the nastiest blow ever received by any Canadian industry from American protective legislation, and they naturally expected some retaliation. Their idea at this time was to make it impossible for Canada to retaliate-to endeavor by legislation at Washington to tie the hands of both the Dominion government at Ottawa and the Provincial government at Toronto.

Accordingly it was provided in the lumber schedule of the Dingley tariff that, if either export duties or increased Crown dues were imposed on logs towed across the lakes to Michigan, the duties on Canadian sawn lumber should be increased automatically by the amount of the Dominion export duty and the Provincial Crown dues.

Canada, as these Michigan lumbermen then conceived, was bound hand and foot. But in drafting the lumber schedule of the Dingley tariff the Michigan lumbermen had failed to anticipate the contingency which has since arisen. They overlooked the fact that it is within the power of the Provincial government to regulate the conditions under which logs shall be cut on the Crown lands; and when, at the beginning of 1898, the Provincial government at Toronto imposed the condition that all logs cut on Crown lands shall be sawn into lumber within the Dominion of Canada, they were confronted with a deadlock, and one from which no relief can possibly be obtained through the schedule in the tariff of 1897, which had been drawn up with such an utter disregard of the rights of Canada.

These lumbermen knew that they had given Canada a hard knock, and early in 1898 they discovered that their manœuvre to prevent retaliation had failed, and that in spite of it Canada was in a position to protect herself. Since then they have been declaiming against the perfidy of the government of Ontario, and charging the government at Ottawa with a lack of good neighborliness in not using its powers, under the Act of Confederation of 1867, to disallow the act of the Provincial Legislature, by which the Ontario manufacturing clause was put into force.

The grievance of the Michigan lumbermen against the Ontario government is that it permitted them to buy trees standing on the Crown lands, and then sought to compel them to manufacture the logs in Canada. It would not suit the Michigan lumbermen to manufacture in Canada, because all logs cut there have to pay the two-dollar duty, and under such a condition the Michigan lumberman who has a mill in Canada would be no better off than the Canadian owner of a mill who ships his product to the United States. The answer of the Ontario government to this charge of unfair dealing is that when the Crown lands are sold it is no concern of the government whether they go into the hands of Canadian or American buyers, and that all buyers know that the lands are taken subject to conditions which are imposed from time to time by the Department of Crown Lands. It may be that in equity the Michigan lumbermen have a grievance; but in view of the history of the lumber clause of the Dingley act and the provocation to Canada which it embodied, it is a grievance which can draw to them very little sympathy. Their scheme in 1897, when the tariff was being revised, was to plunder the consumers of pine lumber in the United States by advancing prices, and to obtain the bulk of their raw material from Canada practically on terms which the lumber schedule

was to put them in a position to dictate. The users of pine lumber in the United States have had no alternative but to submit to the exactions of the monopoly; but adroit as the lumbermen conceived that they were in attempting to tie the hands of the Canadian governments, a plan was easily and quickly devised for thwarting their schemes. The lumber schedule of 1897 is one of the irritations which Sir Wilfrid Laurier evidently had in mind in his reply to Sir Charles Tupper in the House of Commons.

The Canadian grievance against the United States with respect to the lake fisheries arises chiefly from the fact that the government at Washington has no direct control over fisheries in the lakes. In Canada the lake fisheries are controlled and regulated by the central government at Ottawa; and for thirty years past the Canadian Fisheries Department has given continuous care to the preservation and development of the lake. fisheries. The fish are protected by Dominion laws, which establish close seasons, make illegal the capture of spawning fish, and prohibit pollution and obstructions in creeks and rivers flowing into the lakes. From $100,000 to $125,000 a year are expended by the Dominion government in preserving and developing the lake fisheries.

On the American side of the lakes fishermen practically do as they please. There seem to be no laws which they regard it necessary to obey, and the Fisheries Department at Ottawa has more than once in recent years been brought to the verge of abandoning its work and bidding the Canadian fishermen follow the example of the American fishermen and go as they please so long as there are any fish in the lakes worth catching.

Since the High Commission began its work there have been complaints in this country that the Canadian sealers have been demanding exorbitant terms for the purchase of their interest in the fisheries. This may be true; but even as regards this ques

tion, the irritation is not all from the side of Canada. In 1886 the American government attempted to secure a monopoly for the company which leases the seal islands. The dispute went before the Paris tribunal, and in 1892 it was determined that the United States was in the wrong and that damages were due to the Canadian sealers whose vessels and sealing outfits had been confiscated in 1886. It cannot be said that the Paris award of 1892 was loyally accepted by this country. It was declaimed against in Congress, and not until 1897 would Congress pass the act authorizing the treasury to hand the compensation over to the Ottawa government for distribution among Canadian sealers.

the

The discovery of gold in the Canadian Yukon country is responsible for much of the difficulty in connection with the settlement of the Alaska boundary; and the desire on the part of the Pacific coast cities that the United States should have control of all the available entrances from the coast into the Canadian Yukon territory was also responsible for the attempt which was made by the Senate at Washington in 1898 to dictate as to what should be done at Ottawa. Early last year the Dominion government proposed to construct a railway from the Stickine River to Teslin Lake, a length of line which was to form part of a rail and water route through Canadian territory from the Pacific coast to Dawson. Canadian territory on the Stickine River comes down to a point where the river is navigable, but not for ocean-going vessels; and had the scheme of the Dominion government been carried out there would have had to be transshipments in the neighborhood of Fort Wrangell from ocean-going steamers to boats which could navigate the river to the point where the Teslin Lake railway was to begin.

Under a treaty the Stickine River is open to free navigation by the United States and Great Britain.

But in spite of this treaty condition the Senate bill of 1898 denied bonding privileges at Wrangell unless the Canadian government conceded to New England fishermen an absolutely free use of the ports of the Maritime Provinces, altered its railway policy in the Yukon country, discontinued the collection of duties on miners' supplies carried into the Yukon country from American cities, and also issued mining licenses for the Yukon at places in the United States named in the Senate bill. All these conditions were to be forced from Canada before she was to be permitted the right of free navigation of the Stickine River, a right guaranteed to her by the treaty between the United States and Great Britain.

In the United States this bill, originating in the Senate at Washington, received little or no public attention. In Canada it aroused the greatest indignation, and it drew from Sir Richard Cartwright, the present Minister of Trade and Commerce, and long one of the best friends of the United States in the Dominion Parliament, the statement that "if the government and the people of the United States should attempt to violate solemn treaties and deprive us of our solemn obligations and privileges, then it will become the duty not merely of the government of Canada, but the duty of the Imperial government, to take such action as may be found requisite to obtain the rights of the people of Canada, or to demand indemnity for any violation of them."

Such are some of the irritations which Canada has suffered in recent years at the hands of the United States. When these are borne in mind it cannot be a matter of wonder that Canada sometimes assumes an attitude of self-defence, an attitude which gives rise to actions on her part which are considered wanton and needlessly irritating, because the circumstances of the Canadian grievances are not generally understood in this country.