PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 217 



importance, for their valleys focus tlie whole conimti-cial movement, 

 e.g. of Switzerland, both by rail and by water. This puts the people of the 

 upper river-basin commercially at the mercy of the holders of the lower ; at 

 least a third of the Swiss imports before the war were from Germany, and a 

 fifth of the exports went to Germany — much, in each case, done under what the 

 Swiss felt as ' compulsion.' 



In this particular case the people of the Rhine delta were also — politically — at 

 the mercy of the Germans. I'or the natural outlets of the Rhine basin, such as 

 Rotterdam and Antwerp, had taken on naturally the international character of 

 all great ports, while the river-towns behind them, such as Cologne and Frank- 

 fort, were nurseries of intense national feeling, most carefully and criminally 

 fostered by the Government with the declared object of presently imposing 

 that ' nationality ' upon the ' internationalised ' port. One way of entirely 

 undermining a position offering such opportunities to the unscrupulous is inter- 

 national control, with its impartial improvement of the waterway on its own 

 merits. Thus, in 1913 nothing like 1 per cent, of the navigation on the Rhine 

 was British, while over 65 per cent, was Dutch ; but the deepening of the Rhine 

 up to Basel to admit sea-going vessels, e.g. from London or Newcastle, would 

 instantly free the Swiss from their slavish dependence on e.g. Westphalian coal. 



It is the political aspect, however, rather than the economic that I want 

 to press for the moment. The economic aspect is useful only because it can 

 be presented more easily in a statistical form, while the historic — though 

 equally, if not more, illuminating — cannot be applied to recent events. We 

 can see now that Peter the Great did not provide ' a gate by which (his) people 

 could get out to the Bailie,' only one by which foreigners got into Russia; 

 but we cannot have similar knowledge of the political value to Bohemia of 

 the economicaUy invaluable Elbe-Moldau. We cam note, however, that it is 

 essentially a way out, for the quantity of down-stream traffic [e.g. lignite, sugar, 

 grain) is five times that of the up-stream traffic [e.g. iron, cotton, oils). 



The agreements already mentioned, with regard to Elbe and Weser, Tagus 

 and Douro, show that freedom of navigation has been granted as a reasonable 

 courtesy for many years by nearly all civilised Powers, though even to this day 

 Holland has persistently blocked progress by her stupid commercial policy and 

 her unique position at the mouths of Rhine and Maas and Scheldt ; and the 

 essential principles are illustrated by the irrigation laws of Australia and the 

 United States, where everyone now admits that the individual State cannot 

 have any local standing, any riparian claims, as against the Commonwealth. 

 All States, whatever their size or wealth or population, must be equal, though 

 the natural advantages are with the upper riparians for irrigation as with the 

 lower riparians for navigation. 



The serious administrative difficulties are two — concerned respectively with 

 the riparian sovereignty and with the different geographical conditions of different 

 rivers or different parts of the same river ; e.g. you can easily decrease the pace 

 of the Rhine above Mannheim, but not without increasing the susceptibility to 

 frost. 



Historically, riparian sovereignty^ in the case of Rhine and Danube, is only 

 a relic of feudal robbery. When they first became part of the civilised world 

 under Rome, there was no such thing as riparian sovereignty. They were 

 public property, which had to be kept in order and improved ; and for this 

 purpose the Romans exacted dues, which were spent wholly and solely on the 

 upkeep of the waterway. The Franks continued the same custom on the 

 Rhine ; but the feudal system brought in a horde of petty princelings — as 

 impecunious as German princelings have normally been — who completely upset 

 the old regime, converted public into private property, and exacted every kind 

 of tax and toll. Unfortunately, because Rhine and Danube had been frontiers 

 for Rome, they had been associated with a strictly military control, and the 

 legacy of this favoured the feudal princelings — as it also helped to poison the 

 whole political development along both rivers, for they got only the worst side 

 of Roman civilisation. Now we must go back to the primitive conditions. If 

 an international river is a world feature, then its world relation is the first 

 consideration. In that case, riparians must tolerate representatives of the whole 

 world, or of such parts of the world as are most concerned with the particular 

 river, on the executive for the administration <if th(> river. In most cases, 



