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 such time only as the riverain States (without regard to the local interest of the place or the country where they are established) shall find them necessary or useful to navigation and commerce in general.

Art. 115. The Custom-Houses belonging to the riverain States shall not interfere with the duties on navigation. Regulations shall be established to prevent officers of the Customs, in the exercise of their functions, throwing obstacles in the way of the navigation; but care shall be taken, by means of a strict police on the bank, to preclude every attempt of the inhabitants to smuggle goods through the medium of boatmen.

Art. 116. Everything expressed in the preceding articles shall be settled by a general Regulation, in which there shall also be comprised whatever may need an ulterior determination. The Regulation, once settled, shall not be changed without the consent of all the riverain States, and they shall take care to provide for its execution with due regard to circumstances and locality.

The principles which were thus applied to the chief rivers of Western Europe produced but little effect upon the Danube. Its navigation previously to the Treaty of Paris was governed by a Treaty of 25th July, 1840, between Austria and Russia, which since 1829 had been in possession of all the Danube mouths, and by a Treaty of 2nd December, 1851, between Austria and Bavaria , to which Würtemberg had acceded on 5th June, 1855. Both Treaties professed to apply the principles of Vienna. At the Vienna Conferences of 1855, Austria proposed to entrust the regulation of the river to a 'European syndicate,' and to neutralise the islands of the Delta.

The subject was also considered at the Congress of Paris in 1856. The Treaty of Paris (Arts. 15-19) confides all the mouths of the Danube to the Porte instead of Russia, and provides that the principles established by the Congress of Vienna shall be equally applied to this river.

In accordance with those principles a permanent