HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF THE TERRITORIAL SEA 549 



troduction of another principle of delimitation has tended to 

 keep the claims to bays within moderate bounds. 



The various methods of determining the territorial waters 

 of a state referred to above were more or less arbitrary, and 

 did not rest upon a natural basis capable of universal applica- 

 tion. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries another 

 principle was gradually evolved, and was ultimately accepted 

 as furnishing such a natural basis, so that it may now be 

 regarded as an established part of international law. It was, 

 that the maritime dominion of a state ended where its power 

 of asserting continuous possession ended. The belt of sea 

 along the coast which could be commanded and controlled 

 by artillery on shore thus came to be regarded as the terri- 

 torial sea belonging to the contiguous state. Beyond the 

 range of guns on shore ,the sea was common. 



This principle was of slow growth. It did not even receive 

 definite expression among jurists until the beginning of the 

 eighteenth century; but as previously stated (see p. 156), the 

 Dutch ambassadors who came to London in 1610, to endeavour 

 to induce King James to withdraw his proclamation against 

 unlicensed fishing, made use of it in their conferences with 

 the English Ministers, not improbably at the instigation of 

 Grotius. But whether or not Grotius was the person who 

 enunciated the principle in 1610, it is in his writings that 

 we first meet with it, although in a veiled form. It is not 

 mentioned in Mare Liberum, but in his greater work, the 

 Law of War and Peace, which was published in 1625, he 

 said that a state might acquire sovereignty over parts of 

 the sea, in regard to persons by an armed fleet, and "in 

 regard to territory, as when those who sail on the coasts of 

 a country may be compelled from the land, just as if they 

 were on the land." 1 The principle of compulsion from the 

 land is clearly enough expressed, and though Grotius did 

 not define the nature of the compulsion to be exercised, 

 modern writers have generally held that what he meant was 

 compulsion by artillery. If Grotius was the author of the 

 dictum of 1610, he must have had reasons for expressing it 



1 Lib. ii. cap. iii. s. xiii. 2, " Ratioue territorii, quatenus ex terra cogi possunt 

 qui in proxima maris parte versantur, nee minus quam si in ipsa terra reperi- 

 rentur." See p. 349. 



