Mr. MASSINGALE. Mr. Dockweiler, when did they drill the first well out in the sea from Los Angeles, or Long Beach?

Mr. TOLAN. 1894.

Mr. DOCKWEILER. About 1894, in the sea.

Mr. MASSINGALE. Now, let me see if I get you correctly. You had no law in California authorizing the leasing of those submerged wells until 1921?

Mr. DOCKWEILER. That is correct.

Mr. MASSINGALE. They were operated then for a period of nearly 30 years without paying the State of California anything?

Mr. DOCKWEILER. Yes, sir; but I think the attorney general will concur with me, we took those operators and compelled them to make a statement of their complete production through the years, and we settled with them, we brought about a settlement and they then entered into leases with the State.

Mr. WALTER. Under the new leases they are on the same basis as anybody else starting out?

Mr. DOCKWEILER. We have a complete oil-leasing act.

I want to say if there is a question of sovereignty here, there is certainly sovereignty in the State of California and the sovereignty of the State of California has been exercised by legislative action.

Now, this business of sovereignty, I am not an export on international law, and I happen to have studied international law in my course at Harvard under a man who is now in Washington as Assistant Secretary of State, Francis B. Sayre, and if I know anything about the question of sovereignty, and its attributes, even the Federal Government's sovereignty in exercising the attributes of sovereignty, has no right to exercise it in this manner, of taking the State lands or the ocean bed lands 3 miles out to sea, or to exercise a right to claim the minerals of the lands of the floor of the ocean 3 miles out to sea.

It is not even a secondary attribute, if I may use that expression of sovereignty, and the Federal Government has no attribute of sovereignty, and the same attribute it has to defend the Nation, levy and collect taxes, make treaties, to declare war, and make peace, and those are the attributes of sovereignty, and it would be incompatible for the State of California to exercise those attributes, true, but she has an attribute of sovereignty, that is, the right to condemn for public purposes, and now if she wants to build a Federal building in Los Angeles, or San Francisco, or Santa Barbara there is nothing here that prevents taking the best corner in the street and building a Federal building there and condemning it, and paying under the fifth amendment, protecting the owners of that property, and compensating them for that property.

If she wants oil, and she wants to take State lands, she can do it from the State, because she has a superior sovereignty, but when she does it she has to recompense the State for the taking.

Tidelands, as has been explained today, are not public lands. We have public lands in California, belonging to the Federal Government. In 1925, from the sale of public lands, the Federal Government during the Taft administration withdrew 68,000 acres from further oil operations, to create a naval reserve. She has a naval reserve, the largest, perhaps, of any State in the Union, in California,

and if it is a question of sovereignty to be exercised in order that our fleet can have oil, she has exercised a sovereignty in California, because she has jurisdiction over our public lands, and she has exercised that sovereignty.

She has withdrawn those public lands from entry, and she has corralled the 68,000 acres of almost known and proven oil fields in the Elk Hills and in Buena Vista Hills in San Joaquin and Kern Counties.

Mr. MASSINGALE. May I ask you one more question?

What is the theory of the people of California on their right of ownership to these submerged lands between low tide and the 3-mile limit?

Mr. DOCKWEILER. Have we exercised jurisdiction?

Mr. MASSINGALE. What is the theory upon which they claim ownership of those lands, or rather that submerged land between low tide and the 3-mile limit?

Mr. DOCKWEILER. It comes down to us from English law; it comes down to us from the fundamental basis of our own juridicial processes, that is the common law of England, and in England it was understood that the landowner of the coast, the littoral, had this 3 miles out to sea, and you take the Isle of Wight, 3 miles out to sea. and any jurisdiction along the coast of England, had 3 miles out to sea, and that was adopted in the early Hanseatic conferences, I think, in the early making of international law, and it is called a marine league, and it is an arbitrary statement, really, to say "3 miles out

to sea.

Mr. MASSINGALE. Did the treaty of Guadalajara have anything to do with it, because of this controversy arising?

I mean by that, this: I have got the impression, and I get it again now from that propaganda that they stick on my desk, sometimes I read it and sometimes I don't read it, but I have the general impression that by that treaty the Government of the United States preserved all of the public lands of California.

Mr. DOCKWEILER. The treaty of Guadalajara, that was the treaty that covered the Californias. You would have to go back of that treaty and consider what the Spanish considered their own land, but when we entered into the Union as a State by resolution in September of 1815, our State legislature had adopted the common law as the law of the land, and not the Spanish law.

Mr. MASSINGALE. I just want to know, and I didn't want to go by circulars, and you lived there and knew.

Mr. DOCKWEILER. The idea of having jurisdiction over 3 miles out to sea has been established by the Supreme Court, and it is as old as the history of law, as far as I know, and it is as old as international law in its first definitions.

Mr. WALTER. Mr. Dockweiler, would it be possible for the California people to get together this evening and decide on the course of procedure tomorrow morning, with the idea of preventing a lot of reiteration matter from going into the record?

Mr. DOCKWEILER. We can do that.

Mr. WALTER. We will not reconvene until 10 o'clock tomorrow morning.

(Whereupon, at 5:45 p. m., the committee recessed until 10 o'clock tomorrow morning, Thursday, March 23, 1939.)