The development of a system of national law by national Judges offers no analogy to the working of an international Court, empowered, at its free will and pleasure, to disregard the views of a sovereign Power as to the proper rule to be applied in cases as to which international law gives no guidance.

In such cases the ultimate adjustment of differences of view is the appropriate work, not of a law Court, but of diplomacy.
It is hardly necessary to combat the notion that there already exists, _in nubibus_, a complete system of prize law, which is in some mysterious way accessible to Judges, and reveals to them the rule applicable to each new case as it arises.

This notion, so far as it is prevalent, seems to have arisen from a mistaken reading of certain _dicta_ of Lord Stowell, in which that great Judge, in his finest eighteenth-century manner, insists that the law which it was his duty to administer "has no locality" and "belongs to other nations as well as our own." He was, of course, thinking of the rules of prize law upon which the nations are agreed, not of the numerous questions upon which no agreement exists, and was dealing with the difficult position of a Judge who has to choose (as in the recent _Moray Firth_ case) between obedience to such rules and obedience to the legislative, or quasi-legislative, acts of his own Government.
I am, Sir, your obedient servant, T.E.HOLLAND.
Eggishorn, Suisse, September 16 (1907).
A NEW PRIZE LAW Sir,--The speech of the Prime Minister at the Guildhall contains a paragraph which will be read with a sense of relief by those who, like myself, have all along viewed with surprise and apprehension The Hague proposals for an international prize Court.
Sir H.Campbell-Bannerman admits that "it is desirable, and it may be essential, that, before legislation can be undertaken to make such a Court effective, the leading maritime nations should come to an agreement as to the rules regarding some of the more important subjects of warfare which are to be administered by the Court"; and his subsequent eulogy of the Court presupposes that it is provided with "a body of rules which has received the sanction of the great maritime Powers." What is said as to the necessary postponement of any legislation in the sense of The Hague Convention must, of course, apply _a fortiori_ to the ratification of the Convention.
We have here, for the first time, an authoritative repudiation of the notion that fifteen gentlemen of mixed nationality composing an international prize Court, are to be let loose to "make law," in accordance with what may happen to be their conceptions of "justice and equity." It seems at last to be recognised that such a Court cannot be set to work unless, and until, the great maritime Powers shall have come to an agreement upon the rules of law which the Court is to administer.
I may add that it is surely too much to expect that the rules in question will be discussed by the Powers, to use Sir H.
Campbell-Bannerman's phrase, "without any political _arriere pensee._" Compromise between opposing political interests must ever remain one of the most important factors in the development of the law of nations.
I am, Sir, your obedient servant, T.E.HOLLAND.
Oxford, November 11 (1907).
Although the establishment of an International Prize Court of Appeal was not one of the topics included in the programme of the Russian invitation; to a second Peace Conference, no objection was made to its being taken into consideration, when proposals to that effect were made by the British and American delegates to the Conference.

The idea seems first to have been suggested by Huebner, who proposed to confer jurisdiction in cases of neutral prize on Courts composed of ministers or consuls, accredited by neutrals to the belligerents, together with commissioners appointed by the Sovereign of the captors or of the country to which the prize has been brought, as also, perhaps, "des personnes pleines de probite et de connaissances dans tout ce qui concerne les Loix des Nations et les Traites des Puissances modernes." The Court is to decide in accordance with treaties, "ou, a leur defaut, la loi universelle des nations." _De la Saisie des Batiments neutres_ (1759), ii.

pp.
45-61.