654
THE GREEN BAG
tion of the court, opinions were very much divided. Professor Kriege, although admit ting that permanence would give to the court a more stable and judicial aspect, argued that practical considerations were opposed to it. Peace and not war is the ordinary condition of humanity, and why establish a permanent tribunal which dur ing long intervals would have nothing to do? But M. Ruy Barbosa of Brazil ob served that permanence was necessary in order to secure good judges. Temporary judges are wanting in experience, impar tiality, and independence. He suggested that they might devote their years of peace and enforced leisure to the study of mari time law. Professors Kriege and de Martens fav ored the admission of two admirals repre senting the opposing belligerent powers in order to afford necessary information. They would tend to neutralize each other and the preponderance would in any case be on the side of the jurists selected from the Hague Tribunal. Mr Choate declared in favor of the presence of two admirals acting in a purely advisory capacity. M. Barbosa was strongly opposed to the British idea of limiting the right of appoint ment of judges to states having a merchant marine of over 800,000 tons. This, he de clared, would be to submit the weak to the justice of the strong and would substitute another principle (adjudication?) for that of arbitration. He suggested a grouping of the smaller states in such a manner that each group might possess the required amount of tonnage. M. Tcharikoff held the seventh question to be most important and declared that Russia reserved her opinion upon the scheme as a whole until it had been decided what principles of international law should be applied by the court. It was generally agreed that in the absence of conventions, the ordinary.rules of international law would serve as a juristic base in the decision of cases. Several delegates expressed the hope
that the conference itself would succeed in establishing such rules in addition to those that already existed, and that these might serve as a basis of further development by judicial decision. In the meantime, the third and fourth commissions of the conference addressed themselves seriously to the work of formu lating rules of maritime law; but the task proved to be too great and intricate for their combined wisdom, and the results of their labors seem meagre enough. Beyond certain rules relating to "days of grace," the trans formation of merchantmen into warships, the inviolability of mail matter at sea, the exemption of coast fishing vessels, etc., very little has thus far been accomplished in the direction of formulating an authoritative code of maritime law which might serve as a juridical basis for the decisions of an Inter national Prize Court. Especially has there been a total failure to agree upon definitions of contraband and blockade, to prohibit tbe sinking of neutral merchantmen, and to abolish the right of the .capture of private enemy property at sea. But in spite of these failures, partly through private negotiation and partly as a result of further discussion in committee, a pro ject for the establishment of an Inter national Prize Court was finally agreed upon and submitted to the conference at its sixth plenary session on September 21, 1907. It was presented as a joint proposition from the delegations of Germany, the United States. France, and Great Britain, and was accom panied by a lucid and able report read by M. Renault in the name of the comite d'cxamcn of the second sub-committee of the First Commission on Arbitration. In submitting this project, M. Renault explained why an International Prize Court was necessary : "The seizure of a neutral ship implies a real or pretended violation of neutrality. Adjudication seems in this case to be a necessity instead of a concession as in the case of the capture of enemy property. To
