As long as nations hold widely different views on many points of prize law, it cannot be expected that they should agree beforehand that, when belligerent, they will leave it to a board of arbitrators to say which of several competing rules shall be applied to any given case of capture, or to evolve out of their inner consciousness a new rule, hitherto unknown to any national prize Court.

It would seem that the German advocates of the innovation claim in its favour the authority of the Institut de Droit International.

Permit me, therefore, as one who has taken part in all the discussions of the Institut upon the subject, to state that when it was first handled, at Zurich, in 1878, the difficulties in the way of an international Court were insisted on by such men as Asser, Bernard, Bluntschli, Bulmerincq, and Neumann, and the vote of a majority in its favour was coupled with one which demanded the acceptance by treaty of a universally applicable system of prize law.

The drafting of such a system was accordingly the main object of the _Code des Prises maritimes_, which, after occupying several sessions of the Institut, was finally adopted by it, at Heidelberg, in 1887.

Only ten of the 122 sections of this Code deal with an international Court of Appeal.