300 APPENDIX TO BRITISH CASE. 



But let us see upon what principle this other pretension is founded. 

 Those who sustain it assert that the rights of the territorial Sovereign 

 over the sea extend as far as his power can physically reach ; in other 

 words, it is predicated upon a fiction, and because, since the discovery 

 of fire arms, that power can be extended from the coast to a given 

 distance upon the sea, so as to preclude others from approaching it 

 within that distance, the sovereignty reaches thus far. Such is the 

 foundation, and the only foundation, upon which stands that extraor- 

 dinary right. It is, at best, as you see, but a constructive right ; 

 it is nowhere held up as an absolute and original one. Well, be it so. 

 But, then, to what terms will you reduce it? Undoubtedly to these, 

 and none other : that, being founded upon the power of the Sovereign 

 to extend his armed hand beyond the shore, it reaches as far only as 

 that power is felt. The rule of law is, terra? dominium finitur ubi 

 finitur armorum vis -the domain of the land ends where the force 

 of arms terminates. And such seems to be the universally-admitted 

 measure of what, in diplomatic parlance, and in the books treating 

 of the Law of Nations, is termed the maritime jurisdiction. And it 

 is reasonable that it be so. After you have laid down the principle 

 that the ocean is free that it is of nobody, and therefore of every- 

 body the exception, if exception there is, must be kept within the 

 terms of the fictitious right under which it is claimed within the 

 point which the more powerful projector can reach from the shore 

 within cannon's shot, in a word; and that is within three marine 

 miles eo potestas terrce extenditur quo usque, tormenta ex- 

 178 ploduntur eatenus quippe cum imperare turn possidere videtur. 

 Galiani, Hubner, Kluber, Vattel, Azuni, Grotius, all concur in 

 issigning those limits to the land power over the circumambient sea. 

 They were solemnly sanctioned by the Treaty of 1780, constituting the 

 armed neutrality. They had been previously acknowledged in the 

 marine regulations adopted by Tuscany in 1778, by Venice in 1779, 

 and are found reaffirmed in those published by Russia in 1787, and by 

 Austria in 1803; and, indeed, in every convention which has been 

 signed since the closing of the last century. If such be the rule of 

 right and the measure of the supremacy to which a nation may pre- 

 tend over a littoral sea, we have a meaning for the words used in the 

 Convention of 1818 ; we know what constitutes a bay or a gulf of His 

 MAJESTY'S DOMINION, or a -pent up sea, the true and only mare 

 elausum. Such bay, says an eminent writer, must communicate with 

 the ocean only by a strait so narrow that it must be reputed as being 

 a part of the maritime domain of the State to which the coast be- 

 longs; so that you cannot enter it without going through the terri- 

 torial sea of that State; which means twice the distance of a gun- 

 shot, or six miles. It is required besides that all the coasts bordering 

 on such bay be subject to the State claiming such strait. The two 

 conditions must unite to give to any part of the ocean the character 

 of an internal sea, or a mare elausum. 



Our Envoys then committed no oversight, and made no such con- 

 cession in the Treaty of 1818, as is admitted by Mr. Webster. How 

 that eminent statesman could so far have misjudged the sagacity, tact, 

 and subtleness of mind of such men as Messrs. Rush and Gallatin, 

 and of the wisdom and forecast of that far-reaching, astute, alert. 

 and discriminating diplomatist, John Q. Adams, as to suppose that 

 they had all overlooked the untoward remissness of language sup- 



