HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF THE TERRITORIAL SEA 565 



who was judge in the commercial court at Nice, published 

 a work on maritime law, in which he dealt with the terri- 

 torial sea; and adopting the range of guns as the principle 

 of delimitation, he declared that the equivalent distance ought 

 to be fixed at three miles, which, he said, was "without 

 doubt" the farthest a cannon-shot could ever be made to 

 reach. 1 In this Azurii followed Galiani, making the state- 

 ment more definite, and thus we see the three-mile limit 

 put forward by publicists, as the alternative to the range 

 of guns, before the century closed. In point of fact, how- 

 ever, it had actually been applied in the United States a 

 year or two before Azuni wrote ; 2 and it is clear from what 

 he says that no general agreement then existed as to the 

 extent of the territorial sea, for he complained that the 

 limit was still undecided, a statement repeated in his enlarged 

 work, published in 1805, and he contended that it ought 

 to be fixed by a solemn treaty between the maritime Powers, 

 as Meadows had suggested a century before. 3 Although Azuni 

 adopted the principle of cannon range, and, like Galiani, 

 declared that three miles was the farthest that a ball or 

 bomb could be thrown, 4 he was of opinion that for purposes 

 of neutrality, as an asylum against hostilities, the territorial 

 waters should be extended to two leagues from either shore 

 in the case of bays and gulfs, which, he says, even when 

 their centre was at a greater distance than three miles from 

 either shore, were admitted to be territorial. He even strongly 

 recommended the adoption of the range of vision as the 

 boundary of neutral waters in time of war. 



From the above review of the opinions of publicists in 

 the latter half of the eighteenth century, it is evident that 



1 Sistema universale dei Principj del Diritto marittimo deW Europa. Florence, 

 1795-96. The work was translated into French in 1801 Systeme L'nirersel dc 

 Principes du Droit Maritime de V Europe and revised, enlarged, and republished 

 in 1805. 



2 See p. 574. 



3 " Giacche essa sola e, secondo me, il giusto ed unico mezzo, che potrebbe ser- 

 vire di norma per fissare una volta il mare territoriale sempre combattuto, e non 

 ancora deciso, o almeno non stabilito come si dovrebbe in un pubblico Trattato 

 tra le Potenze marittime," i. 75. 



4 " La distanza di tre miglia dalla Terra come quella, che senza dubbio e la 

 maggiore, dove colla forza della polvere a fuoco finora cognita si possa spiugere una 

 palla o una bomba," p. 76. 



