INTRODUCTION 21 



might fall into the background without the national honour 

 being unduly tarnished. But on the whole, the claim to the 

 sovereignty of the so-called British seas became an anachron- 

 ism and was allowed to die out from practical affairs, surviving 

 only in the pages of historians, naval writers, and pamphleteers. 

 During the almost constant naval wars in the eighteenth cen- 

 tury a new principle came into being for the delimitation of 

 the neutral waters of a state, the extent of the adjacent open 

 sea that might be appropriated being determined by the range 

 of guns from the shore. All the water within reach of cannon- 

 shot could be protected and commanded by artillery on the 

 land, and thus made susceptible of exclusive and permanent 

 dominion. This principle was accepted very generally by the 

 various maritime Powers as offering a just and equitable 

 means of fixing the limits of their territorial waters, within 

 which the bordering state had exclusive sovereign jurisdiction. 

 It has also been accepted by the great majority of modern 

 publicists, and the phrase of Bynkershoek, "terrae dominium 

 finitur ubi tinitur armorum vis," has become enshrined in the 

 Law of Nations. 



Later, and mainly through the action and practice of the 

 United States of America and Great Britain since the end of 

 the eighteenth century, the distance of three miles from shore 

 was more or less formally adopted by most maritime states 

 as equivalent to the range of guns, and as more definitely 

 fixing the limits of their jurisdiction and rights for various 

 purposes, and, in particular, for exclusive fishery. At the time 

 the three-mile limit was introduced, that distance did indeed 

 represent the farthest range of artillery, so that the boundary 

 was the same in each case ; and it was sufficient to secure to 

 neutrals that their coasts should not be violated by the opera- 

 tions of belligerents carried on beyond three miles from the 

 shore, while at the same time it furnished a practical measure 

 of the extent of the protection that neutral Powers were )x>und 

 to afibrd to the vessels of one belligerent from attacks by the 

 other. But all this is changed. Guns are now able to throw 

 shells to a distance of fifteen miles and more, and the three- 

 mile limit has become quite inadequate to secure the coasts of a 

 neutral from damage from the guns of belligerents engaged in 

 hostilities in the waters near their shores. The argument is 



