nothing in our laws, or in the law of nations, that forbids our citizens from sending armed vessels, as well as munitions of war, to for eign ports for sale. It is a commercial ad venture which no nation is bound to prohibit, and which only exposes the persons engaged in it to the penalty of confiscation." The American view that vessels built or sent out with the animus vivendi are mere contraband of war, but that any vessels fitted out or dispatched with the animus belligerandi constitute in effect a proximate hostile expedition which it is the duty of the neutral government to prevent, if possible, by the use of a reasonable diligence is one which was long insisted upon, especially by American statesmen, judges, ami publicists, and which still holds a place in some impor tant works on International Law.1 But this view can scarcely be maintained any longer in the face of the First Rule of the Treaty of Washington, and of the increasingly sen sitive and ever-growing sense of neutral obli gations on the part of modern nations. As one of our best American authorities, the late lamented Dr. Freeman Snow, has well said: "In considering this question, it should be remembered that, by the introduction of steam as the motive power of ships, and of iron and steel as the material of their con struction, the conditions of maritime war fare have been very radically changed. What might have been a reasonable rule as ap plied in the time of sailing ships, might now, in the age of swift ironclads, be intolerably oppressive. In the cases of the Santissima Tnnd'ad, U. S. v. Quincy, and the Meteor, the courts were dealing with small sailing vessels, which had been converted into privatee'rs, the possession of which by one or the other belligerent made verv little differ-
1 The best and most authoratative statement of this view is by Dana. See Dana's Wheaton. note 215. p. 563. A recent defence of this view may be found in Taylor. International Law, V., c. 2.
ence in the general result of the struggle: whereas, the possession of an ironclad ship might well turn the scale one way or the other, as indeed it did in the war between Chili and Peru, in 1880-1881. This great power of inflicting injury upon one of the belligerents, it is fair to say. ought not to be permitted to neutral citizens, and the neutral nation is alone in a position to restrain them. In view of these facts, it is believed that the doctrine set up by the United States Neutrality Act and by the Federal Courts. that the 'intent' of the owner or shipbuilder is the criterion by which his guilt or inno cence is to be judged, is wholly inadequate: it would not for a moment stand the test of the rule of 'due diligence,' as applied by the Geneva tribunal." * г Snow's Cases, note on "The Three Rules of the Treaty of Washington" on pp. 437-38. This note has been reproduced, with the addition oí a few references, in the recent enlargment and re vision of Dr. Snow's work, entitled "Scott's Cases," p. 720. The value to the student of th:s otherwise excellent work is greatly impaired by the fact that it is impossible to distinguish in respect to the notes between the contributions of Dr. Snow and those of Dr. Scott except by a comparison of the two texts. We trust that this fault may be corrected in a subsequent edition. The American doctrine of intent has also been justly and severely criticised by a number of Eng lish writers. Walker (The Science, etc., p. 500) points out that it "leaves open to fraud a wide and open door. Who may know the intent of? crafty and secret mind? A thousand tricks and devices may be employed to disarm suspicion. An unarmed vessel may be dispatched from a neu tral port, arms and men from another, and th; intent with which these elements were prepared and gathered together may only become apparent on their combination at some spot far beyond the bounds of the neutral jurisdiction." Law rence (p. 548) says, "nothing if more difficult to prove than intentions. They have frequently ¡o be inferred from actions of an ambiguous charac ter. Moreover, the two intents—that of selling and that of making war—may co-exist in the same mind." Bernard (Neutrality, p. 389) declares. "In international wrongs . . . the intent is not the thing chiefly or mainly regarded: and in interna tional wrongs of this particular class the only intent and the only inadvertance which arc really material are, first, that hostility in the persons who constitute or direct the expedition which makes it noxious instead of harmless: and second ly, that connivance or negligence on the part of the neutral Government which makes the nation
