Let us leave something for future Hague Conferences.
I am, Sir, your obedient servant, T.E.HOLLAND.
Oxford, July 24 (1907).
A NEW PRIZE LAW Sir,--In a letter under the above heading, for which you were so good as to find room in July last, I returned to the thesis which I had ventured to maintain some months previously, _a propos_ of a question put in the House of Commons.

My contention was that the establishment of an international prize Court, assuming it to be under any circumstances desirable, should follow, not precede, a general international agreement as to the law which the Court is to administer.
It would appear, from such imperfect information as intermittently reaches Swiss mountain hotels, that a conviction of the truth of this proposition is at length making way among the delegates to The Hague Conference and among observers of its doings.

In a recent number of the _Courrier de la Conference_, a publication which cannot be accused of lukewarmness in the advocacy of proposals for the peaceful settlement of international differences, I find an article entitled "Pas de Code Naval, pas de Cour des Prises," to the effect that "l'acceptation de la Cour des Prises est strictement conditionnelle a la redaction du Code, qu'elle aura a interpreter." Its decisions must otherwise be founded upon the opinions of its Judges, "the majority of whom will belong to a school which has never accepted what Great Britain looks upon as the fundamental principles of naval warfare." One learns also from other sources, that efforts are being made to arrive, by a series of compromises, at some common understanding upon the points as to which the differences of view between the Powers are most pronounced.

It may, however, be safely predicted that many years must elapse before any such result will be achieved.
In the meantime, a very different solution of the difficulty has commended itself to the partisans of the proposed Court.

M.Renault, the accomplished Reporter of the committee which deals in the first instance with the subject, after stating that "sur beaucoup de points le droit de la guerre maritime est encore incertain, et chaque Etat le formule au gre de ses idees et de ses interets," lays down that, in accordance with strict juridical reasoning, when international law is silent an international Court should apply the law of the captor.