herefore proposed that instead of carrying out the provisions
for a money settlement, the whole question should be reopened. The
Administration at Washington was sympathetic. George Brown was appointed
along with the British Ambassador, Sir Edward Thornton, to open
negotiations. Under Brown's energetic leadership a settlement of all
outstanding issues was drafted in 1874, which permitted freedom of trade
in natural and in most manufactured products for twenty-one years, and
settled fishery, coasting trade, navigation, and minor boundary
issues. But diplomats proposed, and the United States Senate disposed.
Protectionist feeling was strong at Washington, and the currency
problem absorbing, and hence this broad and statesmanlike essay in
neighborliness could not secure an hour's attention. This plan having
failed, the Canadian Government fell back on the letter of the treaty.
A Commission which consisted of the Honorable E. H. Kellogg representing
the United States, Sir Alexander T. Galt representing Canada, and the
Belgian Minister to Washington, M. Delfosse, as chairman, awarded Canada
and Newfoundland $5,500,000 as the excess value of the fisheries for
the ten years the arrangement was to run. The award was denounced in
the United States as absurdly excessive; but a sense of honor and the
knowledge that millions of dollars from the Alabama award were still in
the Treasury moved the Senate finally to acquiesce, though only for the
ten-year term fixed by treaty. In Canada the award was received with
delight as a signal proof that when left to themselves Canadians could
hold their own. The prevailing view was well summed up in a letter from
Mackenzie to the Canadian representative on the Halifax commission,
written shortly before the decision: "I am glad you still have hopes of
a fair verdict. I am doubly anxious to have it, first, because we are
entitled to it and need the dollars, and, second, because it will be the
first Canadian diplomatic triumph, and will justify me in insisting that
we know our neighbors and our own business better than any Englishmen."

Mackenzie's insistence that Canada must take a larger share in the
control of her foreign affairs was too advanced a stand for many of his
more conservative countrymen. For others, he did not go far enough.
The early seventies saw the rise of a short-lived movement in favor
of Canadian independence. To many independence from England seemed the
logical sequel to Conf