ORAL ARGUMENT OP SIR CHARLES RUSSELL, Q. C. M. P. 395 



desiring to save tlie expense of adequately guarding it, to resort to 

 extreme, or cruel, or violent measures in order to strike terror into 

 possible offenders, and prevent the invasion of that frontier line for 

 illicit purposes. It is a proposition which needs a justification that 

 authority does not give it; — that even if an item — because the principle 

 must go that length, — of the property of a nation, however unimportant 

 in value, is seized, it will justify that nation in seizing upon the high seas, 

 the ship in which this property is, and in condemning that ship. Some 

 warrant in international law must be shown in support of so serious a 

 proposition. 



I will put the case in this way, and I invite my friend Mr. Phelps' 

 attention to it when he comes to address you: it is conceded for the 

 purpose of justifying what are the international rights, and what are 

 the international sanctions attached to those rights, that the municipal 

 statute may be treated as if it did not exist — that it may be rubbed out 

 of the record. And now my friend will have the opportunity of telling 

 us to what form of libel he, as a lawyer (if that municipal statute did 

 not exist) could put his name, and which he would maintain in argu- 

 ment before Judges, which could justify the action which has taken 



place in regard to these ships belonging to Great Britain. 

 1194 I have dwelt — I do not intend to recur to it — upon the fact 

 that from the first to the last the proceeding has been based upon 

 the municipal statute, for breach of the municipal statute, and for breach 

 of the municipal statute alonc^. I wish to say a word or two about the 

 point of whether it is possible, now, to turn this municipal statute (even 

 if there were international warrant for the sanction it contains), into a 

 self- preservative regulation. 



Now, Mr. President, I submit that the contention that a Government, 

 proceeding upon a municipal statute, invoking the aid of its municipal 

 Judge to enforce that statute, charging the British subject libelled with 

 an offence against that statute and against that statute alone, should 

 now be heard to say that it can justify its proceedings as an offence 

 against international law, is a very startling proposition. But it is 

 still more startling that a Defendant who has been libelled — whose ship 

 has been confiscated and confiscated upon the ground that he had com- 

 mitted an offence against the municipal statute, is now to be told that 

 he is charged with, and his property confiscated upon the ground of, an 

 international offence of which he was never informed, and which he was 

 never called upon to answer. And, lastly, the proposition is still more 

 startling when you consider the attitude of a Government towards the 

 Judge of its own Court. It appeals to that Judge to put in force the 

 municipal statute; it asks his aid upon the ground that an offence has 

 been committed within the area to which that statute relates. The 

 judge proceeds upon that basis; he considers the question in that rela- 

 tion alone, and yet we are to be told that he was acting as an interna- 

 tional Judge — as Judge of a war Tribunal — although he did not know 

 it: that he was dealing with and proceeding upon the basis of great 

 principles of international law which closely touch the sovereignty of 

 nations and the peace of the world, although his judgment shows that 

 he had not in his remotest apprehension the consideration of the most 

 elementary principles of international law itself. ISTo, Mr. President, 

 this matter rests, must rest, for its justification upon the grounds which 

 they have put forward and put forward with so much deliberation — the 

 grounds taken in the diplomatic correspondence, the grounds taken in 

 their libel in Court, because the Tribunal will not forget the emphatic 



