In this more favorable temper many old issues were cleared off the slate. The northeastern fisheries question, revived by a conflict between Newfoundland and the United States as to treaty privileges, was referred to the Hague Court in 1909. The verdict of the arbitrators recognized a measure of right in the contentions of both sides. A detailed settlement was prescribed which was accepted without demur in the United States, Newfoundland, and Canada alike. Pelagic sealing in the North Pacific was barred in 1911 by an international agreement between the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Russia. Less success attended the attempt to arrange joint action to regulate and conserve the fisheries of the Great Lakes and the salmon fisheries of the Pacific, for the treaty drawn up in 1911 by the experts from both countries failed to pass the United States Senate. But the most striking development of the decade was the businesslike and neighborly solution found for the settlement of the boundary waters controversy. The growing demands for the use of streams such as the Niagara, the St. Lawrence, and the Sault for power purposes, and of western border rivers for irrigation schemes, made it essential to take joint action to reconcile not merely the conflicting claims from the opposite sides of the border but the conflicting claims of power and navigation and other interests in each country. In 1905 a temporary waterways commission was appointed, and four years later the Boundary Waters Treaty provided for the establishment of a permanent Joint High Commission, consisting of three representatives from each country, and with authority over all cases of use, obstruction, or diversion of border waters. Individual citizens of either country were allowed to present their case directly before the Commission, an innovation in international practice. Still more significant of the new spirit was the inclusion in this treaty of a clause providing for reference to the Commission, with the consent of the United States Senate and the Dominion Cabinet, of any matter whatever at issue between the two countries. With little discussion and as a matter of course, the two democracies, in the closing years of a full century of peace, thus made provision for the sane and friendly settlement of future line-fence disputes.