Page:EB1911 - Volume 28.djvu/427

Rh fifteen distinct drops of different amounts and at different times. Each of these drops is located by the time and place records in the book and the time records on the diagram as belonging to a particular service pipe; so that out of possibly 300 premises the bulk of the leakage has been localized in or just outside fifteen. To each of these premises he goes with the knowledge that a portion of the total leakage of 2000 gallons an hour is almost certainly there, and that it must be found, which is a very different thing from visiting three or four hundred houses, in not one of which he has any particular reason to expect to find leakage. Even when he enters a house with previous knowledge that there is leakage, its discovery may be difficult. It is often hidden, sometimes underground, and may only be brought to light by excavation. In these cases, without some such system of localization, the leakage might go on for years or for ever. There are many and obvious variations of the system. That described requires a diagram revolving once in a few hours, otherwise the time scale will be too close; but the ordinary diagram revolving once in 24 hours is often used quite effectively in night inspections by only closing those stop-cocks which are actually passing water. This method was also first introduced in Liverpool. The night inspector carries with him a stethoscope, often consisting merely of his steel turning-rod, with which he sounds the whole of the outside stop-cocks, but only closes those through which the sound of water is heard. An experienced man, or even a boy, if selected as possessing the necessary faculty (which is sometimes very strongly marked), can detect the smallest dribble when the stopcock is so far closed as to restrict the orifice. Similar examinations by means of the stop-valves on the mains are also made, and it often happens that the residual leakage (400 gallons an hour in the last case) recorded on the diagram, but not shut off by the house stopcocks, is mentioned by the inspector as an “outside waste,” and localized as having been heard at a stop-cock and traced by sounding the pavement to a particular position under a particular street. All leakages found on private property are duly notified to the water tenant in the usual way, and subsequent examinations are made to ascertain if such notices have been attended to. If this work is properly organized, nearly the whole of the leakage so detected is suppressed within a month. A record of the constantly fluctuating so-called “night readings” in a large town is most interesting and instructive. If, for example, in the case of a hundred such districts we watch the result of leaving them alone, a gradual growth of leakage common to most of the districts, but not to all, is observed, while here and there a sudden increase occurs, often doubling or trebling the total supply to the district. Upon the original installation of the system in any town, the rate of leakage and consequent total supply to the different districts is found to vary greatly, and in some districts it is usually many times as great per head as in others. An obvious and fruitful extension of the method is to employ the inspectors only in those districts which, for the time being, promise the most useful results.

In many European cities the supply of water, even for domestic purposes, is given through ordinary water meters, and paid for, according to the meter record, much in the same manner as a supply of gas or electricity. By the adoption of this method great reductions in the quantity of water

used and wasted are in some cases effected, and the water tenant pays for the leakage or waste he permits to take place, as well as for the water he uses. The system, however, does not assist in the detection of the leakage which inevitably occurs between the reservoir and the consumer’s meter; thus the whole of the mains, joints and ferrules connecting the service pipes with the mains, and the greater parts of the service pipes, are still exposed to leakage without any compensating return to the water authority. But the worst evil of the system, and one which must always prevent its introduction into the United Kingdom, is the circumstance that it treats water as an article of commerce, to be paid for according to the quantity taken. In the organization of the best municipal water undertakings in the United Kingdom the free use of water is encouraged, and it is only the leakage or occasional improper employment of the water that the water authority seeks, and that successfully, to suppress. The objection to the insanitary effect of the meter-payment system has, in some places, been sought to be removed by providing a fixed quantity of water, assumed to be sufficient, as the supply for a fixed minimum payment, and by using the meter records simply for the purpose of determining what additional payment, if any, becomes due from the water tenant. Clearly, if the excesses are frequent, the limit must be too low; if infrequent, all the physical and administrative complication involved in the system is employed to very little purpose.

The question of the distribution of water, rightly considered, resolves itself into a question of delivering water to the water tenant, without leakage on the way, and of securing that the fittings employed by the water tenant shall be such as to afford an ample and ready supply at all times of the day and night without leakage and without any unnecessary facilities for waste. If these conditions are complied with, it is probable that the total rate of supply will not exceed, even if it reaches, the rate

necessary in any system, not being an oppressive and insanitary system, by which the water is paid for according to the quantity used.

WATERS, TERRITORIAL. In international law “territorial waters” are the belt of sea adjacent to their shores which states respect as being under their immediate territorial jurisdiction, subject only to a right of “inoffensive” passage through them by vessels of all nations. As to the breadth of the belt and the exact nature of this inoffensive right of passage, however, there is still much controversy. The 3-miles’ limit recognized and practised by Great Britain, France and the United States seems to have been derived from the cannon range of the period, when it was adopted as between Great Britain and the United States, i.e. towards the close of the 18th century. Bynkershoek, a famous Dutch jurist, whose authority at one time was almost as great in England as in his own country, in a dissertation on the Dominion of the Sea (1702), had devised a plausible juridical theory to support a homogeneous jurisdiction over environing waters in the place of the quite arbitrary claims made at that time, to any distance seawards, from whole seas to range of vision. Starting from the fact that fortresses can give effective protection within range of their cannon, and that in practice this effective protection was respected, he argued that the respect was not due to the reality of the presence of cannon, but to the fact (hat the state was in a position to enforce respect. This it could do from any point along its shore. Hence his well-known doctrine: terrae dominium finitur, ubi finitur armorum vis. The doctrine satisfied a requirement of the age and became a maxim of international law throughout northern Europe, both for the protection of shore fisheries and for the assertion of the immunity of adjacent waters of neutral states from acts of war between belligerent states. Germany still holds in principle to this varying limit of cannon range. Norway has never agreed to the 3 m., maintaining that the special configuration of her coast necessitates the exercise of jurisdiction over a belt of 4 m. Spain lays claim to jurisdiction over 6 m. from her shores. The writers and specialists on the subject are quite as much divided. A British Fishery Commission in 1893 reported that “the present territorial limit of 3 m. is insufficient, and that, for fishery purposes alone, this limit should be extended, provided such extension can be effected upon an international basis and with due regard to the rights and interests of all nations.” The committee recommended that “a proposition on these lines should be submitted to an international conference of the powers who border on the North Sea." There is already an international convention, dated 6th May 1882, between Great Britain, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany and Denmark, relating to the regulation of the fisheries in the North Sea, which has fixed the limit of territorial waters as between the contracting parties at 3 m. measured from low-water mark and from a straight line drawn from headland to headland at the points where they are 10 m. across. In the British Act of 29th June 1893, giving effect to a subsequent convention (16th November 1887) between the same parties for the regulation of the liquor traffic in the North Sea, “territorial waters” are declared to be as defined in the Territorial Waters Jurisdiction Act 1878. In this Act the definition is as follows:—

The territorial waters of Her Majesty’s dominions in reference to the sea means such part of the sea adjacent to the coast of the United Kingdom, or the coast of some other part of Her Majesty’s dominions, as is deemed by international law to be within the territorial sovereignty of Her Majesty; and for the purpose of any offence declared by this act to be within the jurisdiction of the admiral, any part of the open sea within one marine league of the coast measured from low-water mark shall be deemed to be open sea within the territorial waters of Her Majesty’s dominions.

This definition only restricts the operation of the 3 m. limit to offences dealt with in the act, and does not deal with bays. The act of 1893 declares that the articles of the convention “shall be of the same force as if they were enacted in the body of the act,” but this convention gives no definition of territorial waters.

The jurisdiction exercised in British territorial waters under