In 1887 President Cleveland and Mr. Secretary Bayard, acting in a statesmanlike spirit, obtained the consent of England to a special commission to consider the fishery question.  Sir Sackville West, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, and Sir Charles Tupper represented England; Mr. Bayard, then secretary of state, Mr. Putnam of Maine, and Mr. Angell of Michigan University, represented the United States.  Sir Charles Tupper could not induce the American commissioners to consider a mutual arrangement providing for greater freedom of commercial intercourse between Canada and the United States.  Eventually the commission agreed unanimously to a treaty which was essentially a compromise.  Foreign fishermen were to be at liberty to go into any waters where the bay was more than ten miles wide at the mouth, but certain bays, including the Bay of Chaleurs, were expressly excepted in the interests of Canada from the operation of this provision.  The United States did not attempt to acquire the right to fish on the inshore fishing-grounds of Canada—­that is, within three miles of the coasts—­but these fisheries were to be left for the exclusive use of the Canadian fishermen.  More satisfactory arrangements were made for vessels obliged to resort to the Canadian ports in distress; and a provision was made for allowing American fishing-vessels to obtain supplies and other privileges in the harbours of the Dominion whenever congress allowed the fish of that country to enter free into the market of the United States, President Cleveland in his message, submitting the treaty to the senate, acknowledged that it “supplied a satisfactory, practical and final adjustment, upon a basis honourable and just to both parties, of the difficult and vexed questions to which it relates.”  The republican party, however, at that important juncture—­just before a presidential election—­had a majority in the senate, and the result was the failure in that body of a measure, which, although by no means too favourable to Canadian interests, was framed in a spirit of judicious statesmanship.

As a sequel of the acquisition of British Columbia, the Canadian government was called upon in 1886 to urge the interests of the Dominion in an international question that had arisen in Bering Sea.  A United States cutter seized in the open sea, at a distance of more than sixty miles from the nearest land, certain Canadian schooners, fitted out in British Columbia, and lawfully engaged in the capture of seals in the North Pacific Ocean, adjacent to Vancouver Island, Queen Charlotte Islands, and Alaska—­a portion of the territory of the United States acquired in 1867 from Russia.  These vessels were taken into a port of Alaska, where they were subjected to forfeiture, and the masters and mates fined and imprisoned.  Great Britain at once resisted the claim of the United States to the sole sovereignty of that part of Bering Sea lying beyond the westerly boundary of Alaska—­a stretch of sea extending in its widest part some 600