England promptly handed over to the United States the price of her sympathy with rebellion and slavery. The course of Congress in dealing with the award was not very creditable. For four years the money lay in the treasury vaults, piling up interest at five per cent. until it amounted to $20,000,000. A Court of Alabama Claims was then convened, where private claimants might press their suits. Insurance companies which could show that their losses on vessels destroyed by the cruisers exceeded the premiums received, were entitled to be paid the difference, with interest at four per cent. CHAPTER III. THE FISHERIES DISPUTE Our glance at the Treaty of Washington introduces us to an international complication which has been transmitted from the very birthday of the nation, and is, alas, still unsettled, spite of the earnest efforts to this end made since 1885. Article 3 of the treaty of 1783 was as follows: "It is agreed that the people of the United States shall continue to enjoy unmolested the right to take fish of every kind on the Grand Bank and on all the other banks of Newfoundland; also in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and at all other places in the sea where the inhabitants of both countries used at any time heretofore to fish; and also that the inhabitants of the United States shall have liberty to take fish of every kind on such part of the coast of Newfoundland as British fishermen shall use [but not to dry or cure the same on that island]; and also on the coasts, bays, and creeks of all other of his Britannic Majesty's dominions in America, and that the American fishermen shall have liberty to dry and cure fish in any of the unsettled bays, harbors, and creeks of Nova Scotia, Magdalen Islands, and Labrador, so long as the same shall remain unsettled; but so soon as the same, or either of them, shall be settled, it shall not be lawful for the said fishermen to dry or cure fish at such settlement without a previous agreement for that purpose with the inhabitants, proprietors, or possessors of the ground." This provision conveyed to fishermen from the United States two valuable privileges--that of fishing in British waters, namely, within three miles of the British coast, and that of drying and curing fish, wherever caught, upon certain convenient parts of the British coast. They had, of course, like the men of all nations, apart from any treaty stipulation, the right to fish outside the three mile limit, but this would avail them nothing, under the then mode of conducting the industry, unless they could freely make harbor in case of storm, and also land to cure their catch before lading it for the homeward cruise. What worth these rights had will be clear if we remember that fishing had always been one of New England's foremost trades, and that the waters off Newfoundland and Nova Scotia had from, and probably before, Columbus's time been known as the richest fishing grounds of the globe.