Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/395

Rh government then wisely determined to enforce no restrictions proceeding from itself against domestic commerce, but it did recognize, and very clearly, that with the belligerent the case was radically different and that it had in international law a well-defined right to seize such goods as could properly be classed under the denomination of contraband. But the undeniable privilege of a belligerent to seize contraband becomes complicated with neutral commercial rights when the goods in question are primarily destined for a neutral port. The problems thus arising are concerned with the true and not merely the apparent destination of the goods; the better view and one which seeks to regard the whole carriage of the goods as a single shipment irrespective of whether a brief stoppage is to take place in neutral territory before forwarding to the belligerent, is known as "continuous voyage." This doctrine was developed by the British Admiralty courts from the so called "rule of 1756" by which was meant that Great Britain would not consider valid a shipment of merchandise carried between colonial ports and the mother country by neutrals who were excluded from such a trade in time of peace. This theory of continuous voyage was enforced by our own Supreme Court in the celebrated case of the Peterhoff and in other cases arising through our civil war, where European trade with the confederacy was attempted through West Indian or Mexican ports. The Declaration of London (1909) sanctions continuous voyage as applied to absolute contraband, that is goods which are preeminently those of war; with merchandise equally suitable for war or peace uses, i. e., for conditional contraband, however, the Declaration requires that an immediately hostile destination shall be shown to justify seizure. But the extraordinary development in military and naval war-making instruments, vehicles and methods, of the last few years which has brought the realm of the air into use as a theater of actual campaign, must inevitably lead to the widening of classes of contraband; a similar remark might be made touching the development of submarine apparatus. In cases where material unquestionably destined for use in the manufacture of aerial or submarine apparatus or in their maintenance is consigned in war time to a neutral country which can have no such use for these objects, but which lies adjoining belligerent territory where they are indispensable, it seems impossible to suppose that such material can be excluded from the class of absolute contraband and thus become open to belligerent seizure.

With questions arising from the possibility of such belligerent capture as between two or more governments actually at war, a neutral nation can have, of course, no concern. The equal or unequal course of belligerent fortunes should not be allowed to become in anywise a neutral's affair. For the neutral, the rules deemed sound by the