THE SUEZ CANAL.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume V, Issue 216, 15 June 1877, Page 11

THE SUEZ CANAL.

■ t + The refusal of Lord Derby to consent to neutralise the Suez Canal, as reported in a telegram dated Singapore, June 7th, is to be understood, no doubt, solely of an intention on the part of the English Government to prevent, as indeed it is stated, warlike operations from being carried on there. To interpret the matter in any other light would be to vinderstand that the original Statutes were about to be departed from, and that the care taken by M. de Lesseps to secure this important point of neutrality had been in vain. " The signing powers," he wrote in 1856, " guarantee the neutrality of the Suez Maritime Canal for ever. " No vessel shall at any time be seized either in the Canal or within four leagues of the entrance from, the two seas. "No foreign troops shall be stationed on the banks of the Canal without the consent of the Territorial Government." 4 But not only would an attempt to prevent the neutralisation of the Canal be a departure from the original arrangement and intentions respecting its construction ; it may also be fairly argued that such a step would be a serious infringement of international law, for the channel in question may justly be regarded as a strait which joins together the Mediterranean and the Bed Sea. " Straits are passages communicating from one sea to another," says Wheaton. *' If the navigation of the two seas thus connected is free, the navigation of the channel by which they are connected ought also to be free. Even if such strait be bounded on both sides by the territory of the same Sovereign, — if, at the same time, so narrow as to be commanded by caunon shot from both shores, the exclusive territorial jurisdiction of that Sovereign over such strait is controlled by the right of other nations to communicate with the seas thus connected." To prevent the neutrality of the Canal would not, in fact, lie within the reasonable province of the English Government, under, any circumstances, even supposing it con-

ceded that international law would not be broken by such a deed. This would be the part of the Khedive ; and for England to attempt to influence him in the matter would he for her to give proofs of the truth of an accusation brought against her in France and Germany at the time of the purchase of the Canal shares, when it was said in those countries that it was her object to assume the protectorate of Egypt, if, indeed, she did not aspire to its possession ; while in Italy she was at the same time accused of a sinister design of holding the issue from the Mediterranean by way of Suez, as she already held that by way of Gibraltar. The policy of England is, nevertheless, the neutrality of the Canal, and the perfect freedom of that highway to her Eastern empire and these colonies ; and it is evidently in order that such a neutralisation may eventually obtain that she now in part forbids it, that is, in so far as to declare her intention to prevent warfare being carried on there, — a right of interference which is hers unquestionably, if it be remembered that — all other considerations apart — she holds an interest in the channel alluded to amounting to the value of some millions of pounds sterling.