PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 213 



It is a truism that the ocean attracts rivers and their trade and their riverine 

 population. Industry, commerce, even culture, have been starved and stunted 

 in various parts of the world hy lack of easy access to the sea. Even your 

 League of Nations idea has more than once approximated to a substantial fact — 

 round the Mediterannean and round the Baltic, facilitated by inter-national or 

 inter-racial rivers. The Hanseatic League was essentially based on the relation 

 of a number of more or less inavigable rivers to an inland sea, and that 

 was why it came to include such distant ' inland ' members as Breslau and 

 Cracow. 



Accessibility is now more than ever before a supreme factor in all cultural 

 and economic development, and rivers are still the chief natural intermediaries 

 between land and sea. The first real international attempt to solve the problem 

 of international rivers followed the victory of >Sea Power over the France of 

 Napoleon the Great ; the second has followed the victory of Sea Power over 

 this would-be ' Napoleon ' of Prussia. 



Now, I submit that to many of us the mere Avord river by itself suggests, 

 at once and primarily, a physical unity — no doubt, with some variety of relief 

 and climate — and that on this physical unity we are prepared to sanction some 

 social and economic and even political unity. But directly you add the qualify- 

 ing international, the suggestion changes; the adjective raises a picture not of 

 local features, but of regional relations. 



In recent years I have pleaded for the use of rivers as political boundaries — ■ 

 on the ground that they clearly separate land.s without at all separating peoples 

 except in time of war; we want to preserve the valuable variety of political and 

 cultured units, but to draw the various units together. Our object is unity, not 

 imiformity. The proposal has been objected to — even by some who are not at 

 heart hostile to the idea of fostering all possible aids to the easy, honourable, 

 friendly intercourse of peoples — on the ground that rivers shift their courses. 

 They do, and trouble has come of this in the past, political trouble as well 

 as economic. The Missouri was a fertile source of inter-State squabbles. But 

 no normal person would choose, a mud-carrier, like the Missouri, ' Muddy Water,' 

 as a political boundary, unless there was a marked difference of racial type or 

 nationality running approximately along the line of the river. In fact, I would 

 suggest that the troubles along the Upper Missouri were really due to the fact 

 that the river was nowhere an inter-State boundary, and therefore each State 

 claimed the right to monopolise it in the particular section. If it had been an 

 inter-State boundary from the first, such a claim would have been obviously 

 absurd. And it was the iniquity of the claim to monopoly that forced the United 

 States, as similar conditions forced the Australian Commonwealth, to take over 

 the control of the inter-State riyers. 



The principles behind the control are significant. Thus, the Murrumbidgee 

 is entirely within New South Wales, as the Goulburn is entirely within Victoria ; 

 but the Murray is an inter-State river — in a double sense, acting as the boundary 

 between New South Wales and Victoria, and emptying through South Australia. 

 New South Wales has entire use of the Murrumbidgee, and Victoria of the 

 Goulburn, but the whole volume of the Murray up to normal low-water level is 

 left to South Australia. In Europe navigation is usually far more important 

 than irrigation. Why should not Europe exercise similar control over the 

 navigable rivers of Europe? 



For, geographically, great navigable rivers are essentially a continental 

 feature, i.e. really a world feature, for all major continental features must be 

 included in a survey of world features, even if they are minor world features; 

 and the world can recognise no right of a political unit to regional monopoly 

 of the commercial advantages of such a fea,tur© to the disadvantage of other 

 political units-— least of all, others in the same region. As with the irrigation 

 when a river is obviously and entirely within an area where identity of culture 

 and sentiment proclaims a natural or national unit, there that unit has a claim — 

 even if it should prove impolitic to press it — to some monopoly of the facilities 

 afforded by that river. But when the river runs through or between two or 

 more such natural or national units, i.e. is really international, one of the units 

 has no claim to any monopoly against the other or others. 



It was reasonable that expanding Prussia should get to the mouth of the 

 Elbe, and it was certain that Ilolsteiu had been both a fief of the Holy Roman 



1919. 



