for the reason which you allowed me to point out, some
months ago, _a propos_ of a question put in the House of Commons by Mr.
Arnold Herbert. As long as nations hold widely different views on many
points of prize law, it cannot be expected that they should agree
beforehand that, when belligerent, they will leave it to a board of
arbitrators to say which of several competing rules shall be applied to
any given case of capture, or to evolve out of their inner consciousness
a new rule, hitherto unknown to any national prize Court. It would seem
that the German advocates of the innovation claim in its favour the
authority of the Institut de Droit International. Permit me, therefore,
as one who has taken part in all the discussions of the Institut upon
the subject, to state that when it was first handled, at Zurich, in
1878, the difficulties in the way of an international Court were
insisted on by such men as Asser, Bernard, Bluntschli, Bulmerincq, and
Neumann, and the vote of a majority in its favour was coupled with one
which demanded the acceptance by treaty of a universally applicable
system of prize law. The drafting of such a system was accordingly the
main object of the _Code des Prises maritimes_, which, after occupying
several sessions of the Institut, was finally adopted by it, at
Heidelberg, in 1887. Only ten of the 122 sections of this Code deal with
an international Court of Appeal. A complete body of law, by which
States have agreed to be bound, must, one would think, necessarily
precede the establishment of a mixed Court by which that law is to be
interpreted.

2. While the several delegations are vying with one another in devising
new definitions of contraband, there would seem to be little likelihood
that the British proposal for its total abandonment will be seriously
entertained. Such a step could be justified, if at all, from the point
of view of national interest, only on the ground that it might possibly
throw increased difficulties in the way of an enemy desirous, even by
straining the existing law, of interfering with the supply of foodstuffs
to the British Islands. I propose, for the present, only to call
attention to the concluding paragraph of the British notice of motion on
this point, which would seem to imply much more than the abandonment of
contraband. The words in question, if indeed they are authentically
reported, are as follows: "Le droit de visite ne serait exerce que pour
constater le