As already stated, the most important question with which I had to deal was that which had arisen in the Behring Sea. The United States possessed there a great and flourishing fur-seal industry, which was managed with care and was a source of large revenue to our government. The killing of the seals under the direction of those who had charge of the matter was done with the utmost care and discrimination on the Pribyloff Islands, to which these animals resorted in great numbers during the summer. It was not at all cruel, and was so conducted that the seal herd was fully maintained rather than diminished. But it is among the peculiarities of the seals that, each autumn, they migrate southward, returning each spring in large numbers along the Alaskan coast, and also that, while at the islands, the nursing mothers make long excursions to fishing-banks at distances of from one to two hundred miles. The return of these seal herds, and these food excursions, were taken advantage of by Canadian marauders, who slaughtered the animals, in the water, without regard to age or sex, in a way most cruel and wasteful; so that the seal herds were greatly diminished and in a fair way to extermination. Our government tried to prevent this and seized sundry marauding vessels; whereupon Great Britain felt obliged, evidently from political motives, to take up the cause of these Canadian poachers and to stand steadily by them. As a last resort, the government of the United States left the matter to arbitration, and in due time the tribunal began its sessions at Paris. Meantime, a British commission was, in 1891-1892, ordered to prepare the natural-history material for the British case before the tribunal; and it would be difficult to find a more misleading piece of work than their report. Sham scientific facts were supplied for the purposes of the British counsel at Paris. While I cannot believe that the authorities in London ordered or connived at this, it is simple justice to state, as a matter of fact, that, as afterward in the Venezuela case,[1] so in this, British agents were guilty of the sharpest of sharp practices. The Russian fur-seal islands having also suffered to a considerable extent from similar marauders, a British commission visited the Russian islands and took testimony of the Russian commandant in a manner grossly unfair. This commandant was an honest man, with good powers of observation and with considerable insight into the superficial facts of seal life, but without adequate scientific training; his knowledge of English was very imperfect, and the commission apparently led him to say and sign just what they wanted. He was somehow made to say just the things which were needed to help the British case, and not to say anything which could hurt it. So absurd were the misstatements to which he had thus been led to attach his name that the Russian Government ordered him to come all the way from the Russian islands on the coast of Siberia to St.