Plea of Interests of Com merce. Time at which Interference becomes unjustifiable. of America is very large, and parts of it have been since used for purposes of colonisation. The other ground for interference,-a very doubtful one indeed, is the interests of Commerce. In the case of a State refusing to engage in commercial transactions with other States, it has been sometimes held that the other States have a right to force their commerce upon that State, and to compel it to take a different course from that it is inclined to. It cannot be said that any such right is at present recognised by European International Law, because the only States in respect of which it has been exercised have been signally weak States, such as China, and to which the system of International Law can scarcely be said to extend, or which are too weak to dispute the application of its doctrines. Still it is one of the grounds of an alleged Right of Interference. I here interpose a word about the time at which a State is secure against interference. The question may be put, At what time does a State come into being; at what time,-in the case of a revolution, when a State has taken its rise from a revolution,-does the parent State, or the State from which it has broken off, cease to have a Right to interfere with it; and at what time do other States lose their Right to treat it as independent of the old State if the two States should again coalesce? These are great questions, and have been a great deal debated, in consequence of the late Southern insurrection on the Continent of America. It would require a long time to discuss this fully, Independence of war. but I may say shortly that there are two principles involved which have to be separated from each other. One is that, so long as the contest is undecided, so long as the State has not yet achieved its practical independence, there may be a provisional independence granted to it in respect of the Rights of war, in order that the war may be carried on in accordance with the principles which now regulate all wars between independent States. So long as the contest is going on, a provisional recognition of the State Provisional may exist, merely for belligerent purposes; but for purposes the real test of actual independence may be a very different matter. It varies, and may probably be fixed by different States at different times. It will depend upon a number of circumstances, Actual Indesuch as the length of time the independence has lasted; the extent of the organization the State has gathered around it; the general prospects of its future strength; the degree of orderly government that it has succeeded in establishing; and the relative strength of the new State to establish itself and of the other States to put it down. The direct application of this doctrine is exhibited in the history of the revolt of the Thirteen Colonies from Great Britain when the United States were established. pendence. the National The next class of Rights are those securing the II. Rights securing the integrity of the national territory. The question Integrity of at once comes up as to what is the territory of the Territory. State. There may be cases in which the territory is not wholly limited by any single line. How the territory of a State may be defined. Territory in cludes Waters. III. Rights relating to State in foreign countries. "Thus," quoting from Woolsey (page 79), "the Sea of "Azof, the Volga, Lake Michigan, the Ohio, and the Sea "of Marmora, are exclusively in the territory respectively "of Russia, the United States, and Turkey. It may happen "that the boundaries of a State are not continuous, or that one part of it is separated from another, as the Rhine "Provinces of Prussia are cut off by Hesse from the rest of "the Kingdom. Or it may happen that one Sovereignty, 66 or a portion of it, is included within the limits of another. "This is the case more or less in Germany, and was formerly "true of Avignon, and the Venaissin, which were Papal "territory enclosed in France." It is requisite, then, that every State should have its territory sharply defined; and the general rule is that the territory includes all the waters and seas which are surrounded by the line bounding the territory. Besides this it includes the sea bordering the coast-line to the distance (as generally reckoned) of a marine league; and, in a certain metaphorical sense, the vessels belonging to a nation, wherever found, have some of the attributes of territory, though the arguments based on this assumption sometimes lead to false conclusions. Yet another class of Rights are secured by Intercitizens of the national law,-those relating to citizens of States The best comsojourning in foreign countries. mentary upon this class of Rights is to be found in the late war of England with Abyssinia, which supplies an instance of the kind of protection a State extends over its citizens abroad. I may say that, although a State reserves to itself the Right to protect its citizens, it does not make an engagement with its citizens that it actually will protect them. It does not, as a matter of Constitutional Law, promise its citizens that it will make war on their account. But it reserves to itself the Right of making war in their behalf if they are badly treated in other States. It must, therefore, depend upon all the circumstances of the case, whether it be politically desirable to make war on behalf of the citizens of a State or not. use of com and, V., nected with Another class of Rights consists of those relating IV. Rights to to the use of common things incapable of being mon things, appropriated, or not yet appropriated, such as the Rights conuse of certain navigable rivers, or of unoccupied diplomatic territories and islands. The last though not the representaleast important class of Rights are those connected with political representatives in foreign States, as Ambassadors, Consuls, and the like. tion. Rights. There are two or three other more doubtful Doubtful Rights, on which some writers have insisted, and others not. Some have said that a State has a Right to protect itself in certain crises of National existence by doing a partial injury to other States. You may rather say,-as in the case of similar perplexities in National Law,-that a State might venture to allege, as an excuse for injuring another State, that to do so was necessary to its own protection. That might be pleaded after the fact in a Court of International Law; but you can hardly say that a State can have a Right to injure other States or a Right to violate the Rights of other States. You may rather say that if a particular act, at a particular moment, is necessary for the protection of a particular State, that necessity may be Alleged Right to force com merce. Right to Rights created by special engagement. Treaties. a certain apology for having violated the Rights of other States. I have already referred to the alleged Right to force commerce. There is another Right which is also doubtful: whether, in the absence of special agreement, a State has any Right to the Extradition of prisoners who have committed crimes upon its own soil and who have fled from justice to the territory of other States. The better opinion seems to favour the view that, apart from special treaties, States have no such Right; but writers differ on this point. It is just because there is no such wellrecognised Right that so many treaties have been made on the subject. I now pass to Rights created by special engagements. These are Rights under Treaties. But I must first say something about Treaties generally. We are all familiar with the fact that Treaties are very badly kept, and perhaps I cannot explain better the nature of Treaties than by calling attention to the reasons why Treaties are badly kept. Mr. Mill pointed out, in an essay he wrote on the subject some time ago, that treaties were made for too long a period. It would have been better if he had said that some treaties which ought to be made for a short time were made for a long time. He went further, and said that all treaties should be made for a short time and should be liable to revision. There would be a difficulty in applying that rule, inasmuch as, in cases in which treaties define the line of territory separating States-such as the treaty defining the boundaries of Canada and the United |