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 the United States, there would be transhipment of cargo at an American port in order that the goods might secure the benefits of the free passage. There is no proposal to give a similar exemption for the coastwise trade of Canada, and the discrimination must necessarily press with peculiar hardship on the trade by sea between, say Vancouver and Montreal which has to compete with trade following almost the same lines, say from Seattle in Washington State, only a short distance from the Canadian border on the West, to the ports of the State of Maine equally near the Canadian territory on the East. These objections are the more serious because we are told that under the American law there is nothing to prevent 'coasting' vessels from engaging in foreign trade; they would not lose the exemption from tolls by combining that trade with their coastwise trade: nor is there any restriction on the power of the American Legislature to extend the definition of coastwise trade indefinitely in the future. It might be possible to defend an exemption limited to coasting trade, if that trade were confined to the small craft which ply between neighbouring harbours, carrying goods of small value and purely of domestic trade; de minimis non curat lex, and petty trading of that kind could be no subject of controversy between great nations. But coastwise trade as defined by the law of the United States is 'coastwise' not in fact, but by a fiction of the law; it is coastwise only in the understanding of the enactment which deals with it; in fact, it is not coasting trade at all, it is not trade of purely domestic concern, and it does compete with foreign trade. Therefore, if this exemption from tolls were conferred, United States vessels would be at an advantage as compared with other vessels engaged in the same trade by reason of a discrimination in breach of the Treaty.