216 TRANSACTIONS OP SECTION 



liased on necessity and on the supnort 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 areneralise 

 ns to a common principle — really the princinle of I'ustice ; and so the Treaty of 

 Paris in 1814 and the Congress of Vienna had adopted the principle, and had 

 passed oieneral rules in sympathy with it. rules which have been applied to 

 many rivers and even to canals — e.g. in the old Kinsidom of Poland. In the 

 particular case of the St. Lawrence, the water rieht would not cover any right 

 of portaee ; but, of course, the intevnatioupl boundary comes to this river from 

 NeAv York State below the last of the rapids. 



Tn 1851 Brazil claimed the political right to block the rnouth of the Amazon, 

 but this was universally condemned as a gross misuse of the riotht of rioarian 

 sovereignty, for the mouth of the Amazon is even more truly than the DoUart 

 an arm of the sea — so truly that it separates two distinct faunas ; and. as the 

 Plat* was declared free in 1852, Brazil could not in decency exercise her dubious 

 'nVht.' Tt was not formpllv triven nn. howevev. till 1867; and it lies implicitly 

 behind the recent so-called ' concessions ' to Bolivia. 



Portuguese law raised a similar difficulty in 1883 on the Zambesi. Of course, 

 Portugal wa,'; 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 admitte-d the polificnl ric;ht so far 

 as to consent to l^<^" imposing duties — which, in theory, might have been 

 prohibitive of all trade. 



The Zambesi is specially interesting l;ecause it was concerned with one of 

 the first of those land-corridor= about which there has been so much discussion 

 lately — the ' Caprivi finger.' Everyone except our lawyer politicians knew the 

 real object, the oertain meaning, and the probable result, of our conceding that 

 strip to Germany — thoush most of u,s pictured Oerman troops marching east- 

 ward along it to cut the ' Cape-to-Cairo ' route in Rhodesia, rather than 

 Rbodesians ridin<r westward into Ovnmbnlnnd. But theoretically the Germans 

 made a demand for access to navig;able 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 moral strength. Further, if we accept inter- 

 national land-corridors and international air-corridors, we must accept also 

 international water-corridors, such as a navicjable river or a narrow strait. 



I do not want, however to press an African example, partly because I do 

 want to repudiate entirely the application of the Berlin Conference to any 

 rivers outside Africa. For in 1884 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 engineered 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 unscrupulous propagandists in this country on 'Congo atrocities.' It 

 was, therefore, part of her scheme to press — what was accepted by the Con- 

 ference — that the Congo should be open to all flags for all commercial pui-poses, 

 and that 7)o riparian rights should be recognised. It was equally to her interest 

 that the International 'Committee of Administration agreed upon .should never 

 be set up, and it never has been; and, of course, in 1911 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. 



The whole question has two aspects — (1) the freedom of the actual navigation, 

 and (2) the administration of the river. The former is largely a matter of 

 equity, and so did not appeal to the Dutch or Portuguese 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 considered, 

 .lud 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 insignificant. In the other case, however, they are of supreme 



