No. 599.
Mr. Bayard to Mr. Herbert.
Washington, November 16, 1888.
Sir: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your note of the 11th instant, in which, referring to the proposals heretofore made looking to some reciprocal arrangement to facilitate the saving of life and property in cases of wreck and stranding in the waters between the United States and Canada, you call my attention, under instructions from the Marquis of Salisbury, to an offer on the part of the Canadian government contained in a minute of council passed on the 6th of June, 1879, to make reciprocal arrangements in regard to the coasting trade of the inland waters only of the two countries, to include wrecking and towing privileges. You add that this is a standing offer, and that Her Majesty’s Government is of opinion that it would be to the advantage of the two countries if some arrangement of the kind could be made.
The standing offer in question appears to be the same as that referred to in the extract from a report of a committee of the privy council of Canada, dated 1st June, 1888, which was communicated to me with a letter from Sir Lionel West, written from Beverly, Mass., of the 13th of August last. The text of the minute of 6th June, 1879, was communicated to one of my predecessors by a note of Sir Edward Thornton, dated Newburyport, June 18, of that year.
I may be permitted, in view of the revival of the Canadian declaration that no partial arrangement of reciprocity in this regard will be permitted, to repeat the same surprise which was expressed in this Department’s reply of August 11, 1879, to Sir Edward Thornton’s communication of the original declaration, that any such expression as is contained in the report referred to should have been made in view of the act of the Congress of the United States, approved June 19, 1878, entitled “An act to aid vessels wrecked or disabled in the waters coterminous to the United States and the Dominion of Canada.” That act followed in the line of the concurrent legislation which has done so much in the last seventy years to expand the good intercourse of the United States with the British North American possessions, and gave outright to Canadian vessels the right to render aid or assistance to Canadian vessels wrecked or disabled in the waters [Page 828] of the United States contiguous to the Dominion of Canada, on the sole condition that vessels of the United States should be admitted to perform identical humane services in the waters of the Dominion contiguous to the United States. It appears, from the several declarations of the Government of Her Majesty, made through its authorities in Canada, that the vessels of the Dominion will not be permitted to avail themselves of the privilege granted by the act referred to, except in the case of the reciprocal arrangement which it contemplates being a mere incident to the removal of all “restrictions upon the movements of the vessels of either nation” upon their inland waters, or, as appears to be stated in the report of June 1, 1888, that any arrangement for the mutual saving of life and property from the perils of the inland waters must be extended so as to include full participation in the coasting trade and towing business therein.
Should I, however, be mistaken in this supposition, and it should be merely the wish of the authorities of Her Majesty’s Dominion of Canada to ameliorate those restrictions upon the movements of vessels in the coterminous inland waters which are found in practice to be “unpleasant and inconvenient,” I should be most ready to receive a counter proposition setting forth the ameliorations which they may be disposed to suggest, in order to meet the generous offer of the act of June 19, 1878.
I have, etc.,