NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XL, Issue 12399, 12 October 1903, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

THE -ALASKA'"-.BOUUfbAKT CASE.

A cable message which we publish to-day states that legal argument of counsel before the commission constituted in accordance with the treaty of January last between Great-Britain and the United States to hear and determine the dispute as to the true boundaries between Canada and Alaska, has concluded. The controversy in question is not without resemblance in some respects to that which has been happily determined within the present year by the I arbitration of King Edward between Chili and Argentina;. It has its origin in the same facile but fatuous practice, much in favour with the ; easy-going diplomatists of an earlier time, of attempting to fix a boundary by supposed geographical features, without the preliminary precaution of ascertaining that those features correspond with the mental pictures formed by the negotiators or even that they exist at all. It turns upon the interpretation: of a convention concluded between Great Britain, and Russia in the year 1825. At that time nobody knew, or cared to know, very much about the region it was proposed to divide. Nobody,| suspected that the mainland abounded in .mineral wealth, or would have dreamt, had j its existence been known, that such wealth "\ could be extracted from' those inhospitable j wastes. Mainland, coasts, and islands alike j were valued solely as the sources of a talu- ! able trade in furs, and the object of the i negotiators who met in St. Petersburg was : simply to prevent the factors of the British ! and the Russian fur companies from com- j ing into conflict with each other. The British were established on the mainland and the Russians on the islands, and it was only as a support to these island posts that they claimed and obtained the strip of territory which now, according to the American case, bars Canada, for a distance of over &00 miles, from the' Pacific. The treaty rights of the United States, as purchasers , from Russia in 1867, admittedly cannot go beyond the rights of Russia under the Convention of 1825, and the chief questions submitted to the Commission accordingly relate to the true construction of that instrument. The wording of the principal article* is not so precise as could be wished, but, taken in its general sense, it goes far to justify the interpretation for which, Canada contends. The treaty lays down that the line of demarcation shall follow the summit of the mountains parallel to the coast, and that, wherever this ; summit is more than ten marine leagues "from the ocean," the boundary shall be a line parallel to the windings of the coast, which, however, is never to be more than ten marine leagues from. : it. The- Americans say that the negotiators believed there was a. continuous chain of mountains ;. parallel to the coast, and that, as no such chain exists, the line, must be drawn uniformly at a distance of ten leagues from the coast~-aot of the ocean, but of all the. bays, inlilits, and fiords with. which the mainland 'is indented. " The effect of this, construction would be to render all these, fiords, including the Lynn Canal, which penetrates some 75 miles inland, territorial waters of the United States, and thereby to deprive the Canadian hinterland of free access to the Pacific. We say that the treaty make* no mention of a chain of mountains, that mountains do exist parallel to the coast, though not in a continuous,chain, anil? that, where they exist, the line should follow their summits. The records of the negotiations with Russia confirm the impression produced by the language of, the treaty. Count Nesselrode himself'stated that Russia assured us " libres debouches," and. the Russian negotiators affirmed that they foresaw the pos- | sible discovery, within the strip ceded to Russia, of waters by which the British | posts might have free intercourse with the ocean, and that they were anxious to offer us the "free navigation" of such waters. That the indications in favour of our contention on this head axe tolerably strong may be concluded from ,the fact that, bo lately as 1890 Mr. Blaine himself acknowledged in a despatch that to shut out the Canadians by this strip of land from the sea would have been, "not only unreasonable, but intolerable to Great Britain.' The same strip of land, he adds, which the United States acquired by the purchase of Alaska "gave to Britiish America,, lying behind it, free access to the ocean." The questions of occupation; which have since grown up, give rise to difficulties of feeling and of sentiment, but they cannot affect the question of law, which is the main question referred to the Commission. When that has been settled, a practical compromise on other matters ought to be feasible.

WAB OFFICE MUDDLING. Very important in itii bearing on: the internal organisation of tie War Office and on the whole question of our unpreparedness for wai (says the London Times) is the evidence of Sir J. Ardagh, who till recently was head of the Intelligence Department; the nearest equivalent We have so far had to that/" brain of the Army" which ail European armies . consiider of such paramount importance, and which has just been organised in the TJnited States on the most lavish scale by the influence oi President Roosevelt. Sir J. .Ardagh is convirleed of the absolute necessity for th* existing department to receive a, very large increase both in authority and in staff and expenditure to enable it to cope with the duties of preparation for war— other words, to make it equivalent to a "General Staff." The fusion with the mobilisation department carried out by Mr. Brodrick and the still more recent creation of the Imperial Council of Defence have done a good deal in the former direction in the latter, prac«tically nothing has yet been done to remedy the starvation in mon«y and officers from which the department suffers. Sir J. Ardagh'a evidence with regard to his own repeated representation;!) before the war reinforce in the most striking way Lord lisher's plea for a real Army Board, where the head of each department can urge his _vievvs with full responsibility and in the presence at his colleagues—views that a Secretary of State would be very careful not to, disregard without the very strongest reasons. If the prospects of war in South Africa had been seriously discussed before such a board, it is inconceivable that Sir J. Ardagh's demand for £18,000 a year for mapping would have met with an offer

,:; ——S* of £100! But the fact h Sir J. :' was a subordinate; lie was not responsibly''"'•■'' for anything but the- supply of informatics The means, given him wherewith to collet it were miserably inadequate, and, when ho did supply it, it was, in practice, thou A-.'' " perhaps not in theory, nobody's business t 0 make any use of it or study its bearish. on the possibility of war. The necessity 0 | developing the Intelligence Department iMa a policy department, or "brain 0 f th 6 army," is Sir J. Ardagh';? chief co v '.u«. .-[ from the war. At present the department is ludicrously understaffed.- Some 20 '' officers have to deal With the duties for which 150 are provided in the Gerffla* army, though the problem of defending tits ' British Empire is incomparably more com. plex than anything the Germans have fa consider. Sir J. Ardagh made repeated efforts before the war to secure an increase " but in the invertebrate organisation of thft" War Office he could never bring sufficient, I pressure to bear on any point to produce a result. He had no authority to prepay any plan of campaign, and, except an over, worked Commander-in-Chief, with no staff'' beyond his aides-de-camp, there was a one to do so. Officers in South Afrit*, could draw up defence schemes based on the troops they had under them, however disproportionate they might be i:o what was required in war. Nor was there, apart* from definite plans, even any general cotw ccption of the broadest lines of polls* , ' The Intelligence Department assumed the war would be defensive, to begin with at ' least. The officers commanding iti' Soiitiis Africa thought only of an offensive cam-* paign in the Republics and neglected their • own defences. A policy department fa [ close touch with the Cabinet might ha% I made the situation so clear to the lattcg that it would either have hurried on its j military preparations or dragged on negolij., 1 tions till ib had collected an. adequate force | in South Africa, and such a measure might even have averted war. "Do on think/ 11 he was asked, "if we had 30,000 o? 40,003 ' troops in South Africa sir month before war was declared, the Boers wo'id hav» attacked us?" "No," was the reply, "theft would have bf.en no war." Not oily wag there no common point of view between the officers commanding in South Africa in peace time and the Intelligence Department at Home, or between the latter mi the Cabinet, but no care was taken to give any general instructions either to tie osficers already on the spot or to those seng out on the eve of war. It would la als surd to try to prescribe the details of thV plan of campaign to be adopted by a general when once the opposing forcis have ■ got into strategical touch with each' other*! but the general underlying idea of toe cam* paign and all the arrangements fix bring* \ ing the troops together down to the moment of impact are things {hat cannot safely be left to improvisation at: the last) moment by a worried and overworked com* mander. ■ ■