PACIFICATION COMMISSION |
| DIRECTOR Gabor Stinkers |
ABOUT
I took the letter to the President, and expressing to him my suspicion, that the above passage particularly had never been written at Paris, requested him to cause search to be made among his private papers for the original leiter, if there ever had been one. The search was accordingly made, and the letter was found, On comparing them together. 1 immediately perceived that the original was marked private: which the duplicate was not. .1 turned immediately to the prophesies of the duplicate: in the original they were not. 1 looked to the passage in the duplicate, which represents the fishing privilege, not only as utterly insignificant, and trifling in value, but as having been proved to be so by the best information '-.ce (the Plenipotentiaries at Ghent) could obtain on the subject." There was a whole system of misrepresentation in these •words we could obtain; for they represented the incorrect estimate of the value of the fishing privilege which they introduced, as the result of information obtained by the whole mission at Ghent, as having been there discussed, and as aggravating the wrong of the majority, in offering so extravagant an equivalent, for what the\ knew, upon their own inquiries, to be of so little value. Knowing, as I did, that the information was all misinformation; that no information concerning the value of the privilege had been, or could have been, obtained by the joint mission; and lhat, excepting some doubts as to its value, expressed, not by Mr. Russell, it had never been even a subject of conversation in the mission—I turned to the real letter from Paris, to see how the writer had expressed himself there, and found he had written, "according to the best information that lean .obtain on the subject." I saw immediately that all that tale about the obscurity and humidity of the atmosphere, in the high northern latitudes, to degrade the value of the Labrador fishery, was not in the original even pretended to have Keen information sought or obtained by the joint mission; that the discovery which it discloses was not pretended to have been ever made known to the mission;.that the fogs, so pernicious to the, curing of the fish, were in the original letter, if not merely the vapours of Mr. Russell's imagination, at least no more than the result of the best information that lie could obtain. And I instantly snw, too, the motives for the substitution of the words we could irr-the duplicate, for the words / c«?i, in the original. As the original had been written the bill of mdittment which it virtually contained ogaiiast the majority of the mission, left them at liberty to say, in then defence, that if they had overrated the value ot'the tishing liberty, it had been at least an honest error It left them at liberty to inquire, why Mr Russell in their disunions upon. the fishery question, had not revealed to them tbis great discovery of obscurity and humidity and incessant fog*, which lessened so much the Volue of the fishing libeity. The we could of the duplicate took from them all such means of defence It represented them as having nilfuily sinned igainst their heller knowledge; as having sought info, mation of the value of the fishing liberty—as having obtained proof of its worth]ess;iesij—and yet a.* having persisted in offering for it an equivalent which Whs to let in butish smugglers, British emissaries', and all the horrois of Indian warfare, upon the unoffending inhabitants of the West Was this one ofihose corrections which Mr. Russell believed himself permitted to make, which appeared to him proper, to exhibit his case most advantage* ou»l\ before the tribunal of the public?