GERMAN PIRACY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 4 February 1941, Page 9

GERMAN PIRACY

THE -RULE" OF NECESSITY. Looking through a large- number of letters in my private archives from the late Sir Frederick Pollock writes Brigadier J. H. Morgan K.C., to the -Daily Telegraph." I am moved to send you the enclosed which was written on August 5. 1914, on the morrow of that flagrant violation cf Belgian neutrality which precipitated the.outbreak of the last war. The writer was. as many of your readers will recall, a. great jurist of European reputation, whose name was a household word ir the law schools of Germany. Ha* wrote to me: "Some good people seem to think there is no public law in Europe, or that it is not worth defending unless one's purse is actually cut by the robber. Even they will perhaps have their eyes opened by the frank statement of the German position or rather that of the usurping Prussian Junkers that ’necessity’ justifies the breaking of any public law. the party who is to; profit by the breach being the sole judge. To tolerate that means a return I to ‘FaustrechC and the extinction of! all the smaller States. One must go back to Louis XIV. fur such arrogance 1 — 1 doubt whether even Napoleon: claimed as much. The prevalence of the < unscrupulous war parly at Berlin is a I horrible disappointment. I always ’ thought it possible, but hoped it was j improbable." Five years later, after serving as a valued member of the Government Committee of Inquiry into Breaches of the Laws of War. Pullock was so outraged by the evidence laid before that committee in relation to the German conduct of the war at sea that jurist though he was. he threw to the winds of academic speculation the or-; thodox definition in International Law , of “piracy." and publicly branded the i German Admiralty in the pages of the; Law Quarterly Review as nothing better than a lair of “pirates" who had repudiated all laws, human and divine. His trenchant words would appear apt to the present occasion.