105

A.—4

-1 June, 1911.] Declaration of London. [3rd Day. Sir EDWARD GREY— cont. Other Powers, and some of them comparatively recently, have claimed that food should be treated as absolute contraband of war, so that what really has hitherto existed has been chaos in the matter, and the result is this : that when two Powers have been at war we have never known for certain — the world has never known for certain—what the action of those two belligerents would be with regard to neutral merchant vessels, a subject in which we are more interested than anybody else because of the enormous amount of our merchant shipping. We have never known what their action would be. They have drawn up and issued their own rules, in doing it they have interpreted international law according to their own convenience and to what suited them best, and when we have not approved of their rules, or not approved of their practice when they interfered with our neutral merchant vessels, we have had to depend for redress upon decisions of prize courts, which were the prize courts of the enemy themselves. The prize court of a belligerent is never a satisfactory tribunal for a neutral to have to appeal to. It is, of course, the person against whom the claim is made—that is, the belligerent Power—being judge in his own cause. We felt that was so unsatisfactory, and some of the decisions given, by the Russian Prize Courts in the Russo-Japanese War were so unsatisfactory, that when I was first confronted with the situation when I came into office, especially with regard to the sinking of merchant vessels, of which two or three cases occurred in the course of the Russo-Japanese War, I felt we were face to face with a situation which ought not to be allowed to continue without some attempt to put it right. The sinking of ships had especially annoyed us from the fact that we could not get compensation from the Russian Prize Courts in all cases. We did obtain compensation in one or two cases, though not on the ground that it was illegal to sink the ships, but because they had been improperly interfered with —not on the.ground of principle, but merely in particular cases. When we came to the Hague Conference we found that there was by no means the consensus of opinion that might have been expected against the right of belligerents to sink neutral ships. So that we were confronted with this first of all: that international law was in a state of chaos and we could not depend on any international agreement, and also the decisions of the enemy's prize courts were unsatisfactory. That being so we agreed with others to promote a Prize Court Convention which would substitute in cases of this kind an International Prize Court as a Court of Appeal from the prize court of the belligerent, from which hitherto there had been no appeal. That obviously must be a considerable gain if we are neutrals. If a British merchant vessel is interfered with by a belligerent, we must in the future have a better chance of getting redress from an International Prize Court than we have from the prize court of the belligerent, which is all we had to look to before. But then, having settled that there was to be an International Prize Court, which we did settle at the Hague Conference, it followed from that that it was desirable that, as it had also been shown there was no agreement about international law on these points, there should be between nations an agreement drawn up as to what was the international law which the International Prize Court should administer. That is how the Declaration of London came into being. It did not arise out of nothing; it followed really on the decision of the Hague Conference that there should be an International Prize Court Convention. Now, I would like the Conference to know what we did before the Declaration of London. We had an Inter-Departmental Conference in which the Departments concerned were fully represented, and we drew up instructions to our Delegates, which instructions, of course, contained what we wished to obtain. Our Delegates contended for that at the Conference. They did not obtain all they wished, and you never do, of course, at an International Conference, but they obtained; in our opinion, certain advantages which were, as the result of the Conference, worth taking. I shall deal with the three points only which I think Mr. Batchelor has raised —how we stand with regard to food-supply in time of war, how we stand with-regard to the sinking of merchant vessels, and then whether the operations of our Navy—and, of course, the Dominion Navies too—would be crippled in time of war. ' I think those were the three points.