144 



NATURE 



[October i6, 1919 



the particular facility should be admitted wiihout any 

 special treaty. 



This claim has been specifically put forward on 

 several occasions. For instance, by the Treaty of 

 Paris (1763) we had the privilege granted to us of 

 "navigation on the Mississippi to the sea,^' and " (o 

 the sea " meant "out onto the sea." When the river 

 passed under the control of the United States, the 

 conditions were altered. Spain had granted no such 

 facility to them, and she claimed the political right 

 to block the estuary against them, while Jefferson 

 claimed that they had a natural right to use the 

 whole river, i.e. had such a "right in equity, in 

 reason, in humanity." The same question arose on 

 the St. Lawrence, where we claimed the political 

 right to block the lower river against the United 

 States in 1824. The case is specially important 

 because Adams at once admitted the political right, 

 i.e. the riparian "sovereignty," but claimed — as Jef- 

 ferson had done — a natural right to use the river 

 itself, a right which he based on necessity and on 

 the support of the political Powers of Europe as 

 formulated in many conventions and agreements and 

 commercial treaties. 



There had been so many of these that it had 

 become possible to generalise as to a common prin- 

 ciple — really the principle of justice ; and so the 

 Treaty of Paris in 1814 and the Congress of Vienna 

 had adopted the principle, and had passed general 

 rules in sympathy with it — rules which have been 

 applied to many rivers and even to canals, e.g. in 

 the old Kingdom of Poland. In the particular case 

 of the St. Lawrence the water right would not, cover 

 any right of portage ; but, of course, the international 

 boundary comes to this river from New York State 

 below the last of the rapids. 



In 1851 Brazil claimed the political right to block 

 the mouth of the .'\mazon, but this was universally 

 condemned as a gross misuse of the right of riparian 

 sovereignty, for the mouth of the Amazon is so truly 

 an arm of the sea that it separates two distinct faunas ; 

 and, as the Plate was declared free in 1852, Brazil 

 could not in decency exercise her dubious "right." It 

 was not formally given up, however, until 1867; and 

 it lies implicity behind the recent so-called "conces- 

 sions " to Bolivia. 



Poi'tuguese law raised a similar difficulty in 1883 

 on the Zambezi. Of course, Portugal was our oldest 

 ally, and our relations were very friendly; but, though 

 she neither controlled nor traded with the interior, 

 she claimed the political right to block the estuary 

 against us, and we admitted the political right so far 

 as to consent to her imposing duties — which, in 

 theorv', might have been prohibitive of all trade. 



The Zambezi is specially interesting because it was 

 concerned with one of the first of those land-corridors 

 about which there has been so much discussion lately 

 — the " Caprivi finger." Everyone except our lawyer- 

 politicians knew the real object, the certain meaning, 

 and the probable result of our conceding that strip to 

 Germany — though most of us pictured Grerman troops 

 marching eastward along it to cut the " Cape-to- 

 Cairo " route in Rhodesia, rather than Rhodesians 

 riding westward into Ovamboland. But theoretically 

 the Germans made a demand for access to navigable 

 water on an international river, and we recognised 

 this as a reasonable demand, and granted it. Here, 

 again, we stand historically in a position of great 

 mora! strength. Further, if we accept international 

 land-corridors and international air-corridors, we 

 must accept also international water-corridors, such 

 as a navigable river or a narrow strait. 



I do not want, however, to press an .African 

 example, partly because I do want to repudiate 

 entirelv the application of the Berlin Conference to 

 NO. 2607, VOL. 104] 



any rivers outside Africa. For in 1^84 Africa was 

 essentially a virgin continent, and its inhabitants were 

 completely ignored — in theory by all the deliberators, 

 and in practice also by the nation which had en- 

 gineered the conference. For one of Germany's 

 essential objects was to converge on the Congo, and 

 squeeze out Belgian interests; and eventually, to do 

 that, she did not hesitate to employ the most un- 

 scrupulous propagandists in this country on " Congo 

 atrocities." It was, therefore, part of her scheme to 

 press — what was accepted by the conference — that the 

 Congo should be open to all flags for all commercial 

 purposes, and that no ripcurian rights should be recog- 

 nised. It was equally, to her interest that the Inter- 

 national Committee of Administration agreed upon 

 should never be set up, and it never has been; and, 

 of course, in 191 1 she used the trouble which she 

 had provoked in Morocco to acquire 100,000 square 

 miles of the French Congo, so that she became a 

 territorial Power in the west as well as in the east of 

 the Congo basin. 



The whole question has two aspects — (i) the free- 

 dom of the actual navigation, and (2) the administra- 

 tion of the river. The former is largely a matter of 

 equity, and so did not appeal to the Dutch or Por- 

 tuguese lawyers; the latter is largely a matter of law, 

 and has been much complicated by legal subtleties. 

 But the two are closely connected, for the European 

 rivers with which we are specially concerned, all 

 have a lower course over the plain and an upper 

 course involved in the folds and blocks of Central 

 Europe. They are, therefore, important in the one 

 case merely as carriers by water, and — all things con- 

 sidered, and in spite of superstitions to the contrary — 

 are probably dearer as well as less flexible than the 

 carriers by rail that cross them from west to east; 

 thus the quantity of foodstuffs that reached Berlin — 

 or New Orleans — by water in 1913 was quite in- 

 significant. In the other case, however, they are 

 of supreme importance, for their valleys focus the 

 whole commercial movement, e.g. of Switzerland, 

 both by rail and by water. This puts the people of 

 the upper river-basin commercially at the mercy of 

 the holders of the lower ; at least a third of the Swiss 

 imports before the war were from Germany, and a 

 fifth of the exports went to Germany — much, in each 

 case, under what the Swiss felt as "compulsion." 



In this particular case the people of the Rhine delta 

 were also — politicallv — at the mercy of the Germans. 

 For the natural outlets of the Rhine basin, such as 

 Rotterdam and .Antwerp, had taken on naturally the 

 international character of all great ports, while the 

 river-towns behind them, such as Cologne and Frank- 

 fort, were nurseries of intense national feeling, most 

 carefully and criminallv fostered by the Government 

 with the declared object of presently imposing that 

 "nationality" upon the -"internationalised" port. 

 One way of entirelv undermining a position offering 

 such opportunities to the unscrupulous is international 

 control, with its impartial improvement of the water- 

 way on its own meriis. Thus in 1913 nothing like 

 T per cent, of the navigation on the Rhine was 

 British, while more than 6^ per cent, was Dutch ; 

 but the deepening of the Rhine up to Basel to admit 

 sea-going vessels, e.g. from London or Newcastle, 

 would instantly free the Swiss from their slavish, 

 dependence on e.g. Westnhalian coal. 



It is the political aspect, however, rather than the 

 economic that I want to press for the moment. The 

 economic aspect is useful only because it can be pre- 

 sented more easily in a statistical form, while the 

 historic — though equally, if not more, illuminating — 

 cannot be applied to recent events. We can see now 

 that Peter the Great did not provide " a gate by which 

 [his] people could get out to the Baltic," only one 



