Meantime, the arbitration tribunal was holding its sessions at Paris, and the American counsel were doing their best to secure justice for our country. The facts were on our side, and there seemed every reason to hope for a decision in our favor. A vital question was as to how extensive the closed zone for the seals about our islands should be. The United States showed that the nursing seals were killed by the Canadian poachers at a distance of from one to two hundred miles from the islands, and that killing ought not to be allowed within a zone of that radius; but, on the other hand, the effort of the British counsel was to make this zone as small as possible. They had even contended for a zone of only ten miles radius. But just at the nick of time Sir Robert Morier intervened at St. Petersburg. No one but himself and the temporary authorities of the Russian Foreign Office had, or could have had, any knowledge of his manoeuver. By the means which his government gave him power to exercise, he in some way secured privately, from the underlings above referred to as in temporary charge of the Foreign Office, an agreement with Great Britain which practically recognized a closed zone of only thirty miles radius about the Russian islands. This fact was telegraphed just at the proper moment to the British representatives before the tribunal; and, as one of the judges afterward told me, it came into the case like a bomb. It came so late that any adequate explanation of Russia's course was impossible, and its introduction at that time was strenuously objected to by our counsel; but the British lawyers thus got the fact fully before the tribunal, and the tribunal naturally felt that in granting us a sixty-mile radius--double that which Russia had asked of Great Britain for a similar purpose--it was making a generous provision. The conditions were practically the same at the American and Russian seal islands; yet the Russian officials in charge of the matter seemed entirely regardless of this fact, and, indeed, of Russian interests. After secret negotiation with Sir Robert, without the slightest hint to the American minister of their intended sacrifice of their "identical interest with the United States," they allowed this treachery to be sprung upon us. The sixty-mile limit was established by the tribunal, and it has proved utterly delusive. The result of this decision of the tribunal was that this great industry of ours was undermined, if not utterly destroyed; and that the United States were also mulcted to the amount of several hundred thousand dollars, besides the very great expense attending the presentation of her case to the tribunal.