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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: menaced her with injury. All this began in 1850 and ended, as we know, in
the time of Roosevelt.
About 1887 our seal-fishing in the Behring Sea brought on an acute
situation. Into the many and intricate details of this, I need not go;
you can find them in any good encyclopedia, and also in Harper's Magazine
for April, 1891, and in other places. Our fishing clashed with Canada's.
We assumed jurisdiction over the whole of the sea, which is a third as
big as the Mediterranean, on the quite fantastic ground that it was an
inland sea. Ignoring the law that nobody has jurisdiction outside the
three-mile limit from their shores, we seized Canadian vessels sixty
miles from land. In fact, we did virtually what we had gone to war with
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