n.

Tactical reasons have, no doubt, operated to induce the Government to
include in the Consolidation Bill the provisions for which statutory
authority must be obtained before it will be possible to ratify the
Convention; instead of first introducing a Bill having this sole object
in view, and afterwards, should this be passed, inserting the new law in
a reintroduced Consolidation Bill.

The course adopted necessitates an otherwise unnecessary preamble, and
the qualification of the new Part III. by the words "in the event of an
International Prize Court being established" (Clause 23). The reference,
by the by, in this clause to "the said Convention" is somewhat awkward,
no mention of any Convention having occurred previously, except in the
preamble of the Bill. Is not also the statutory approval given by this
clause, not only to the Convention of 1907 but also to "any Convention
amending the same," somewhat startling, as tending to exclude
Parliamentary criticism of such an amending Convention before its
ratification?

By Clause 9, the members of the Judicial Committee who are to be
nominated to act as the British Court of Appeal in cases of prize are to
be described by the novel title of "the Supreme Prize Court." Is not the
use made of the term "Supreme" in the Judicature Acts, as covering both
the High Court and the Court of Appeal, already sufficiently
unsatisfactory?

But the question which, of all others _saute aux yeux_, in reading the
new Part III., is whether the Convention is to be approved as it stands,
irrespectively of a general acceptance of the new Code of Prize Law
contained in the Declaration of London of 1909. The objections to Art. 7
of the Contention, providing that, in the absence of rules of
International Law generally recognised (and on many points of Prize Law
there are no such rules), the Court is to decide in accordance with
(what it may be pleased to consider) "the general principles of law and
equity," are well known. The purpose of the Declaration of London
(itself the subject of much difference of opinion) was to curtail this
licence of decision, by providing the Court with so much ascertained
Prize Law as to render action under the too-elastic phrase above quoted
almost inconceivable.

Is it too much of a counsel of perfection to suggest that the debatable
questions arising under the Convention of 1907 and the Declaration of
1909 should first be threshed out in discussions on a Bill