dealing with
those questions only; and that the decision, if any, thus arrived at
should be subsequently inserted, freed from hypothesis, in the
Consolidation Bill which has so long awaited the leisure of the House of
Commons?

I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
T. E. HOLLAND.
Oxford, July 10 (1910).

THE NAVAL PRIZE BILL

Sir,--The Government has so far yielded to the representations of the
Opposition as to have refrained from forcing on Friday night a division
upon the Naval Prize Bill. Is it too much to hope that the Government
may even now withdraw altogether a measure so ill adapted to place
fairly before Parliament the question of the desirability of ratifying
two documents held by a large body of competent opinion to be certain,
if ratified, seriously to endanger the vital interests of the country?
The Bill, as I have already pointed out, as originally drawn, was a
careful consolidation of the law and procedure governing British Courts
of Prize. Into this has now been incongruously thrust a set of clauses
intended to give effect to a novel and highly controversial proposal for
the creation of an International Prize Court. About the Declaration of
London, alleged to contain a body of law which would adequately equip
such a Court for the performance of its duties, not a word is said in
the Bill; yet, should approval of the Bill be snatched by a purely party
majority, the intention of the Government is to proceed straightway to
the ratification both of the Prize Court Convention and the Declaration.
Whether they intend also to endeavour to obtain the ratification, as an
auxiliary Convention, of the lengthy covering commentary upon the
Declaration, supplied by the committee by which the Declaration was
drafted, does not yet appear. Of such a step I have already written that
it "would be calamitous should a practice be introduced of attempting to
cure the imperfect expression of a treaty by tacking on to it an equally
authoritative reasoned commentary. The result would be _obscurum per
obscurius_, a remedy worse than the disease."

The alternatives before Parliament on Monday next will be either, by
reading the Naval Prize Bill a second time, to bring about, in the teeth
of protests from those best qualified to express an independent opinion
upon the subject, the immediate ratification of the Convention and the
Declaration, or to ask that before, this momentous step is taken the
infinitely complex and delicate