Suchergebnisse

As a result of the continual development of the northwest provinces of the Dominion of Canada, the railroad is advancing slowly closer and closer to the Hudsonian Sea. The Canadian Northern Railway aims to extend its system to Port Nelson, and the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway proposes to build a line to Fort Churchill, both suitably protected harbors on that great sea. If during a short portion of the year the breadstuffs harvested in Saskatchewan and Alberta could be transported to either or both of these points on the Hudsonian Sea, and then by steamer to Liverpool or some other European port, the length of the route between the northwest prairies of Canada and the markets of Europe would be considerably shortened.

Many of the foremost jurisconsults of the world, representing many nations, have in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries stated that Hudson Bay, a great North American sea, is a part of the open sea, and consequently free to the vessels of all nations for the purposes of navigation and fishing. This seems to have been a generally accepted doctrine until the close of the nineteenth century. Within recent years, however, the Dominion of Canada has set up the claim that all American vessels that enter Hudson Bay to catch fish or hunt whales must pay a license. The maintenance of such a policy would be tantamount to making of Hudson Bay a closed sea (mare clausum).

Modern international law is generally regarded as beginning with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. But it is necessary to go much further back in the history of the world for the beginnings of the law governing the intercourse of nations. The Greek states had a rudimentary inter-state law that regulated their relations. Thus they practiced arbitration in a way among themselves: they recognized the sanctity of the person of heralds, and they followed other recognized customs in their dealings one with another. When Rome and Carthage and other nations were struggling for the mastery of the world, the beginnings of a law of nations were recognized and practiced between them. Upon, however, practically all the known world coming under the sway of imperial Rome, all possibility as well as need of a law of nations was wanting, and as a result the faltering beginnings of an international law as recognized among the Greek states and then by the Powers surrounding the Mediterranean, were extinguished by the extension of the Pax Romana to all the known world.

The announcement of the discovery of the North Pole raised in several quarters, among others the British and the Canadian Parliaments, the question whether the act of discovery gave to the United States any right of possession over the North Pole.In searching for the answer to this question, it is necessary to ascertain the rules of the Law of Nations that govern analogous cases.

In the contest of the western powers of Europe to colonize the New World, France, owing to a mistaken policy, failed completely and saw her flag and sovereignty practically driven back from this hemisphere. The early attempts of Admiral de Coligny to colonize the Huguenots first in Brazil and then in Florida, were, owing to the indifference and even opposition of the French crown, abortive. And in the later effort of the French crown to colonize in Canada and Louisiana, the attempt to bring over the remains of feudalism as opposed to the strong individualism that characterized the English settlers, reinforced by the Hollanders in New Netherlands, the Swedes and the Germans in Pennsylvania, and the Huguenots in Virginia and the Carolinas, doomed the French settlers, in the valley of the Saint Lawrence and at the mouth of the Mississippi, to defeat in their effort to extend their language and supremacy over the continent of North America.