"Mistress of the Seas!"-the noblest trust ever reposed by the world in one of its Sovereign Nations. Long may it rest there; for there it is indeed safe.

Britannia! thy Trust of the Ocean's domain
Is thine as of right as the Sea's Suzerain
Accorded to thee first as Mistress of Might
Next as one that's arrayed in the vestures of
Right.

But with the passing away of the extravagant pretensions, other minor ones were advanced to the contiguous Sea along each country to distances varying from time to time and with the notions of different countries. Some of them claimed 100 miles; others 60; and later on in the development of ideas gunshot or cannon range from the shore was the limit of demarcation, till finally in very recent times a marine league from the shore has met with almost universal acceptance.

This in general parlance as well as in legal phraseology has come to be designed "The Territorial Waters."

III.

England though for many centuries a great Maritime Nation had not been prolific in great writers on the Sea, either legal, political or philosophical. Indeed till about the time of the Reformation her Treatises on all Law, National as well as International, were scanty; for she regarded herself not so much as a Great Island Nation as one of the European Family of Nations through all the years from the Norman Conquest till her awakening in the 16th century.

She depended largely upon Continental writers for theories of Law in general; and she did so particularly in regard to those relating to the Sea. Her very Lawyers were trained and educated in Continental Law Schools!

Hale, no doubt, had something to say about the Sea and so had Littleton and Coke as well as Selden.

But largely on this subject they were plagiarists of continental dogmas. They asserted England's absolute Sovereignty over the "Narrow Seas"; and as that quixotic notion has long since vanished, their views do not avail us anything to-day.

Moreover the views of these great Jurists were rejected or discarded by Queen Elizabeth herself when she defiantly resented a capture by the King of Denmark of an English ship on the Norway coast and claimed even then that the Ocean was free and open to the World.

There has been, however, a series of evolving ideas to which I will briefly refer beginning with Grotius, who is acknowledged to be the founder at all events of modern International Law.

In his De Jure Belli et Pacis Lib. II., cap. 2, published about 1609, Grotius says:

"

'The sea, considered either universally or as to its principal parts, cannot be held as property by any nation. It is boundless, and therefore cannot be possessed, that is occupied."

And again:

"While no right could be acquired to the exclusive possession of the ocean, an exclusive jurisdiction might be acquired in respect of particular portions of the sea adjoining the territory of individual States."

Here is the very root distinction drawn between proprietory right and jurisdiction, the one being absolute, the other merely administrative, and the latter always implying an ultimate sovereignty of control.

Puffendorf followed Grotius's views nearly a century later; and at the beginning of the 18th Century Bynkershoek in his De Dominio Maris while claiming a kind of territorial dominion over the Sea fixed the extent of it by his famous maxim Potestas finitur ubi finitur armorum vis. This was the cannon-range from shore theory; and if we only pause to look we will see the idea underlying this is that the Sea belt was conceded for purely protective purposes, the cannon being an implement of war repellant of aggression,

but of no utility in times of peace, and certainly not destructive of commercial or friendly intercourse between Nations.

Hubner, (1759) Vattel, (1777) and Moser and Marten, (1778) all followed timidly as if they were groping their way; but while asserting with more or less variation, a Semi-Sovereignty over adjacent Seas, they all agreed that the extent of the dominated water was limited, and that the dominium was for protective purposes only.

These theories played their part in the revolutionary epidemics of the 18th century; and the 19th century advanced considerably beyond them. Rather I should say it rationalized and clarified them.

Pascal Fiore in 1865 distinctly disclaimed any Sovereignty at all over the Sea which washes the shores of a country, but designated the authority over a part of that Sea as a "dominium utile in the interest of the country's preservation." He denies there is any authority to interfere with vessels in that Sea not unfriendly or menacing in their movements to the particular country.

M. Ortolan in his Diplomatie de la Mer, Liv. II,, takes another step in denying that the indefinite right over the Territorial Sea is a Right of Property. It cannot, he says, be maintained that the State which is the proprietor of the Land is also proprietor of the adjacent Sea. Here are his words:

"En un mot l'etat a sur cet espace non la propriété, mais un droit d'empire; un pouvoir de législation, de surveillance et de jurisdiction, conformement aux règles de la jurisdiction internationale."

This, of course, is to a large extent a reaffirmance of what Grotius had long previously asserted.

M. Calvo in his Droit International takes the same view as Ortolan as also do such writers as Heffter, Bluntochli, Masse and Hautefeuille, Chancellor Kent in his famous Commentaries, and Mr. Halleck in his American Book on International Law where he

insists on the radical distinction between Maritime Territory and Territorial Jurisdiction.

Manning, Wheaton and Amos, three English authors, are in harmony with those I have cited, and confine the purpose of the jurisdiction over the Sea to particular things-protection of the adjacent territory, and control of fishing, customs, taxes, etcetera, within a limited part of the Sea. Here a veritable police control has distinctly culminated out of the embryonic ideas.

IV.

It is to be observed that these various writers, one after the other, completely abandon the claim to ownership of the Sea. They cease, too, to advance the theory that the adjoining Sea is part of the contiguous land, and they reject as absurd the expansion of the Sovereignty of the Land into or over the Sea, according as the claims to the Sea rose and fell-now to the wide Ocean; then to the "Narrow Seas," and from that again to cannon range; then to 100, then to 60, then to three miles from the shore.

The rights over the Sea, they admit, are not inherent in the adjacent Territorial Sovereignty; but they are an appendant or an adjunct to it. The Sovereignty of the land is a dominium imperium; and these Rights over the Sea are a dominium utile. The ultimate Sovereign to which these Rights are subject is the aggregate of the World's Nations.

This very idea, let me here say with a slight divergence, is the pioneer conception of the "League of Nations" with which all the World is now enraptured. What is the function of this League but the curbing of the Sovereignty of each Nation in the interest of all?

I now turn to see what England herself, by her actions, has reflected as her views on this momentous question.

She has always kept the Land and the Sea apart in her Laws and Jurisprudence.

Since the 18th century, at all events, she has recognized that while she is Sovereign of the Landof the realm and its dominions-her authority in or over the Sea is controlled and regulated by the comity of Nations.

To

This itself is an abandonment of the theory that the Sovereignty of the Land and of the circumambient Sea is an integrity and something indivisible. hold the contrary would involve the admission that England is not a Sovereign Nation; for the ultimate control of the Sea by international Law is an undeniable fact. If the Land and Sea Sovereignty were one, then England by submitting to control would not be an absolute Sovereignty.

She is saved from such a degradation by discarding autocratic pretensions, and adopting the rationality of the Law of Nations or of Nature.

The Common Law and Admiralty Law are, as we know, of ancient origin evolving from isolated instances, into customary rules, and maturing into general principles. The one prevailed within the realm; the other over the Sea. And they were dispensed through two distinct Jurisdictions-the Courts of Common Law, and the Courts of the Admiral. One could not encroach or entrench on the other. Though there are instances of attempts on the part of the Admiralty Courts to be aggressive, their actions were as promptly resented or neutralized by prohibitions and other mandatory proceedings by the Courts of Common Law.

To avert is, in the 13th year of Richard II. a statute was enacted:

"That the Admirals and their deputies shall not meddle from henceforth with anything done within the realm of England, but only with things done upon the sea."

And again in the 15th year:

"Over all manner of contracts, pleas and other things within the bodies of counties the Admiral's Court shall have no shall be tried ... and

manner of jurisdiction, but such remedied by the law of the land."