Now, my lords, I come to the second point in my criticism, the admission of the principle of destruction of neutral prizes which is contained in article 49. This is also one of the points submitted by the German representatives and agreed to in the Declaration. Article 48 says: A neutral vessel which has been captured may not be destroyed by the captor; she must be taken into such a port as is proper for the determination there of all questions concerning the validity of the capture. That is quite right and in accordance with the hitherto accepted law of nations, and is fully borne out by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in his letter to Sir Edward Fry at The Hague conference, in which he said: As regards the sinking of neutral prizes, which gave rise to so much feeling in this country during the Russo-Japanese War, Great Britain has always maintained that the right to destroy is confined to enemy vessels only, and this view is favored by other powers. Concerning the right to destroy captured neutral vessels, the view hitherto taken by the greater naval powers has been that, in the event of it being impossible to bring in a vessel for ajudication, she must be released. You should urge the maintenance of the doctrine upon this subject which British prize courts have for at least 200 years held to be the law. But all that goes to the board in the next article, No. 49, which says: As an exception a neutral vessel which has been captured by a belligerent warship, and which would be liable to condemnation, may be destroyed if the observance of article 48 would involve danger to the safety of the warship or to the success of the operations in which she is engaged at the time. Thus article 48 says you may not sink neutral vessels, while article 49 says you may if you like. The commander of the warship is the judge on the spot as to whether the neutral vessel is carrying contraband, and the operations in which he is engaged is commerce destroying, and he would not be doing his duty to his country if he allowed anything to interfere with the success of these operations, and so he is bound to take full advantage of article 49. The Declaration allows this innovation on the practice of 200 years; the signatory powers can not protest; the only appeal is to the international prize court which I have already alluded to. Before the Declaration the neutral power would have protested energetically if her ships had been sunk, but now she must wait for the individuals who have suffered to prove a negative in an undetermined language in the international prize court. If we were at war and the United States were neutral much of our grain from North America would come here in United States ships. Under articles 34 and 49 these ships may be sunk, and I do not see how the United States, if she ratifies this treaty, can protest, and the same remark applies to the other signatory powers. In this respect, instead of being better off under this Declaration, as the Under-Secretary of State avers, we are a great deal worse off than we were before. The last of the three points to which I desire to call attention is the absence of any provision in the Declaration for preventing the conversion of merchant vessels into commerce destroyers on the high seas. This is a most vital consideration as regards this country, which owns 50 per cent of the sea carrying trade of the world. The first article of the Treaty of Paris of 1856 is: "Privateering is and remains abolished"; but attempts are being made to revive it in a worse form than has ever been experienced. The matter can not be put plainer than it is by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in his instructions to our representative. On the eve of the conference he wrote: Apart from the important question of principle involved, there are two practical considerations which have chiefly weighed with His Majesty's Government in refusing to recognize the right to convert merchant vessels into ships of war on the high seas. One is the facility which such a right would give to the captain of a merchant vessel qualified to act as a warship to seize enemy or neutral ships without warning. The other is that enemy vessels under the mercantile flag, but suitable for conversion, would be able, as merchantmen, to claim and obtain in neutral ports all the hospitality and privileges which would, under the accepted rules of naval warfare, be denied to them if they were warships. Availing herself of these advantages, such a vessel, found in distant waters after the outbreak of hostilities, would be enabled to pass from one neutral port to another until she reached the particular point in her voyage where she might most conveniently be converted into a commerce destroyer. Surely this is a very grave omission in the new code of sea warfare. The matter has been left undetermined. Germany, France, and Russia were in favor of conversion on the high seas, and the United States, Great Britain, Japan, Italy, Austria, Holland, and Spain decided against it. Is the international prize court to decide for or against? In the Russo-Japanese War this country protested against the Russian Volunteer Fleet coming as unarmed ships through the Dardanelles and acting as commerce destroyers, and Lord Lansdowne's protest was at that time upheld. Although we own, roughly speaking, one-half of the sea trade of the world our ocean highways are very inadequately policed. I believe that from Vancouver to Cape Horn we have no cruisers capable of defending it if attacked by swift converted liners. Our 27 cruisers free for that purpose are quite inadequate in the other parts of the world, and we should want an enormous addition to our commerce protectors if this right of conversion on the high seas is to be permitted. My lords, I have tried, very briefly, to point out the reasons why, in the opinion as expressed by large sections of our business community, the Declaration of London should not be ratified. Although I am most strongly in favor of international agreements which have as their end the settlement of disputes by arbitration and not by war, yet I believe that this Declaration is so grossly unfair that it will rather invite war against this country than prevent it. By the conversion at sea of peaceful vessels into commerce destroyers without notice on the high seas, by the sanction of the destruction of neutral prizes, and by articles 33 and 34 which imperil our food supplies in neutral ships, we are exposing ourselves to new and most grave dangers. The Declaration of London constitutes the greatest peril to us as an island power, and I trust it will never come into operation. I should like to press for an answer to the three questions I have put. Is the Declaration binding, if signed, on the signatory powers, supposing the international prize court is not set up? Is the commentary of M. Renault to be considered as an authoritative interpretation of the Declaration? And will the Government name the ports in this country to which neutral vessels carrying foodstuffs and other conditional contraband would have free access? In conclusion, I may say that on the whole the concluding paragraph of the Declaration is the one with which I am in most accord-namely, "Done at London," for that is where we have been done, and on Februray 26, 1909. My noble friend, Lord Lamington, who has a motion on the paper to refer this matter to a royal commission, is unfortunately prevented by indisposition from being in his place, and therefore on his behalf, if it is consonant with the rules of the House, I should like to move the motion. Moved to resolve, That, in the opinion of this House it is desirable that a royal commission be appointed to report on the advisability of this country agreeing to the terms of the Declaration of London.1 (Lord Desborough.) The EARLE OF DESART.2 My lords, I think I am entitled to ask this evening for a special measure of that indulgence which your lordships always so generously and freely accord to a member of this House who addresses you for the first time, because in my first essay in political and parliamentary speech I have to deal with a question of great complexity and difficulty, and one which has been the subject of much criticism. In putting before your lordships my views, which I feel strongly and honestly, I wish to say that I do not speak in any sense for the Government. The noble lord who has just sat down will, I am sure, not think me discourteous if I do not immediately touch on the particular questions he has raised, though I shall have to deal with them later in a different order from that in which he has placed them before the House. 1 A similar resolution was introduced into the House of Commons by Mr. Butcher on June 29. See post, p. 261. * Lord Desart was the British plenipotentiary at the naval conference at London in 1908-9 and a British member of the International Court of Arbitration. My position is not quite an ordinary one. I am interested more than most people in this Declaration, because I had the honor, under the instructions and authority of His Majesty's Government, of presiding as British plenipotentiary at the conference of London which drew up the articles of the Declaration, and at the conclusion of the discussions I had the satisfaction of knowing that the result was approved by His Majesty's Government. I have been told, though I do not think it matters much, that personal attacks have been made on the actual delegates. I am quite sure the noble lords. on both front benches will agree that I need not concern myself with these attacks, because it is well established that when a public servant is employed to act by his political superiors blame or approval for him is to come from them and the responsibility is theirs if they adopt his conclusions and act upon them. I only say that because of my colleagues who worked loyally with me in pursuance of the instructions they received, and who, I think, ought not to be subject to comment of that character. I myself have carefully abstained from taking any part in the discussions that have raged round this document and round the conditions under which the international prize court was proposed to be established. I have carefully abstained from newspaper correspondence and from attending gatherings to which I have been invited at which the subject was discussed, but I hope I am not doing anything wrong in addressing your lordships to-night. I am no longer an official, and with the knowledge I necessarily have of how the conclusions were reached I think it is almost a duty to afford such explanations as I can make, by going through the Declaration, avoiding as far as possible a controversial tone, and merely commenting on what seems to me to be the effect of the various provisions embodied in the Declaration. The difficulty I have found in considering what I should say to-night lies in the great mass of the material, and in the consciousness that the subject can not be familiar to more than a small number of your lordships, and, indeed, the knowledge of it is not easily to be acquired. We who have been engaged in this task, not merely at the time of the Declaration but long before it, have endeavored to consider the conditions under which naval warfare would now be waged, how they would operate to the advantage or disadvantage of this country, and, lawyers though some of us were, to try and draw practical conclusions as to the results both of the existing condition of things and of the provisions that will be found in the Declaration. I had the advantage of being assisted in those labors by the then Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear-Admiral Slade, now commander-in-chief in the East Indies, and by the Secretary to the Imperial Council of Defense, both naval officers of large experience who had studied this subject for many years, and to whom I can never sufficiently express my indebtedness. My colleagues of the Foreign Office were also familiar with the conditions, and they afforded me equally valuable assistance. We took instructions from time to time on points that arose, and we had, I believe, in all the more difficult and crucial questions the direct authority of the representatives of the Government in the course we adopted at those moments. The outcome was this Declaration; and I would like, before I embark upon it, to say a few words about the light in which I think it ought to be considered. You can not, it seems to me, take the Declaration standing by itself and say, "That is good; that is bad; and as there is something bad in it we won't have it." What you have to do is to try to see how the existing conditions really work out in practice, to see what they really are, to see how far the rulesand it is not very far that rules exist at all on many points-would operate in time of war in regard to the interests of this country, whether as belligerents or neutrals, and, finally, how the Declaration itself would work out by comparison. That is, I think, the only standpoint you can take in order to judge whether, first, the thing is in itself an advance in international law, and, most im- ́ portant of all, whether it does injure our country as belligerent or neutral. There can be no question that, whatever advantage it might be in some cases to us as neutrals as regards our trade, if in order to gain that advantage we had to make any sacrifice of any practicable belligerent right we now possess and can exercise, the neutral interest must go. There is no doubt, I think, about that. When I suggest that the provisions of the Declaration must be compared with the existing state of things I do not think that we can reasonably go back to the great wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; because the conditions, not only of trade, but in all ways, are totally different owing to the Declaration of Paris. Whether that Declaration was wisely adopted by this country or not is a matter on which different people may have different opinions. Mr. Bowles, to whom the noble lord referred, has strong views on that matter. I do not agree with him on many things, but on that point I very largely agree with him. I do not, however, see how it is possible to contemplate that we could go back upon it. Practically every nation in the world of any importance has accepted it. I know that the United States is said to be an exception; but it is really not an exception at all. The reason it was not accepted by the United States at the time was because of their objection to privateering being forbidden. They had no objection to the other rules; and since that time, being no longer dependent on their mercantile population and their mercantile ships to act for them in time of war, they have adopted it in their recent war with Spain. It is |