The Dominion WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 2, 1929. LAW ON THE SEAS.

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 83, 2 January 1929, Page 8

The Dominion WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 2, 1929. LAW ON THE SEAS.

Senator Borah is not the first American, or the first neutral, to complain that the international rules governing war at sea concede too much to the belligerents and too little to the neutrals. Emphasising in a special interview the need for recodifying these particulat rules, to the end that “there shall be a minimum right to belligerents and a maximum right to neutrals,”-the Senator declared that a naval race between Britain and America, would be inevitable unless it could be avoided by a thorough understanding of the rights ot neutrals at sea. ’ . . . The connection between a naval race and the rights ot neutrals is not at first sight apparent. Closer examination, howeversuggests two possible points of view as the basis of Senator Borah s observation. 1 I In the first place, Americans throughout the late War made no secret of their dissatisfaction with the rules of contraband and the right of visit and search at sea. This dissatisfaction was given particular emphasis by the Borah group in the American Senate, and its leader ever since has been insisting on the necessity for an international conference to review the whole field of Maritime Law. The agitation for this, in 'fact, has been stressed to the point of submitting it as the one alternative to a challenge for supremacy in naval construction. In the second place, it is clear that if the Rules of War at Sea were so radically reconstructed as to give, as Senator Borah suggests, the maximum right to neutrals and the minimum right to belligerents, it would be so difficult to carry on hostilities at sea without being constantly involved in embarrassing and expensive complications with neutrals that operations might be reduced to stalemate. There is no doubt, as experience has abundantly proved, that in war time neutrals are apt to get in the way of belligerents. _ At the same time, however, it has to be recognised that operations of the belligerents are possibly as great a handicap to the neutrals, who, in the present state of the sea laws, appear to have the worst of the existing arrangements for conserving the rights of the combatant nations.

If America carries her point for an international conference on Maritime Law, then a line of thought is suggested which might have important results. It is part of the arrangements for the maintenance of law and order in civil life that individual citizens are, not allowed to commit breaches of the peace by settling their differences violently in public places. This rule is made not only in the interests of belligerently-inclined citizens, but also of other members of the community who fail to see why their peace should be disturbed by the disputations of individuals with whom they have no concern. That is precisely the thought that occurred to some of the neutrals during the war. If hostilities could be strictly confined to the territories of the belligerent nations, the recently-developed objection to war as an instrument of policy might not have reached its present force. Experience has shown, however, that the repercussions of an international conflict are felt throughout the world. Added to the lesson which the actual belligerents have learnt, that modern war is barbarous, cruel, and wasteful, is the lesson learnt by the neutrals that it is also an unmitigated nuisance and an unwarrantable interference’with their normal activities. This latter constitutes a very practical and solid objection. America, moreover, has had the lessons of both sides of the proposition, first as a neutral during the larger part of the War period, and then as a belligerent. One can understand, therefore, and appreciate that nation’s desire for a revision of the whole question of neutrals’ rights. An international conference on the subject might turn out to be an additional weapon in the hands of the peace advocates, and from that point of view would be well worth while.