AMERICAN NEUTRALITY 391 



government then wisely determined to enforce no restrictions proceed- 

 ing 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 contra- 

 band. 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 en- 

 forced by our own Supreme Court in the celebrated case of the Peter- 

 liof^ 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 continu- 

 ous 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 jus- 

 tify 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 contra- 

 band; 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 neu- 

 tral's affair. For the neutral, the rules deemed sound by the acknowl- 



5 Case of The William, 5 Christopher Kobinson, 385, where a vessel was not 

 allowed to claim stoppage in a neutral port to justify colonial trade. 



6 5 Wallace, 28. 



