The Declaration Of London With An Intro And Notes And Appendices

Author : Norman Bentwich
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781331342106
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (421 download)

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Download or read book The Declaration of London written by Norman Bentwich and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-13 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Declaration of London: With an Introduction and Notes and Appendices It has provided me with arguments to controvert rather than with material to embody. Mr. Bowles is the Rupert of the battle which is being fought about the Declaration; and in his fierce charges against any supposed derogation of our old belligerent rights at sea, and his headlong opposition to any kind of international agreement, he is often carried in a cloud of rhetoric far away from the true facts of that Prize Law of which he claims to be the champion. With the criticism of the Declaration advanced by another class of writers who regard it "as an instrument of national destruction," and declare that "its provisions are absolutely certain to produce universal starvation in this country in the event of a war with Germany," I have not thought it necessary to deal in detail. These writers suffer from a kind of national neurasthenia, and can never be happy unless they are themselves in a panic, and are doing their best to bring their countrymen into the same condition. But their notions of International Law are as strange as their complete distrust of the ability of the English fleet to protect our commerce; and their appalling prophecies of the effects of ratifying the Declaration are not more striking than their ingenuous faith that, if there were no Declaration, our enemy would adopt, or the neutral powers would compel him to adopt, just those provisions of our Prize Laws which would suit our interests. At the same time I recognise the force of the criticisms made by the great commercial bodies of this country, to which certain features of the Declaration have given rise, more especially the articles dealing with Conditional Contraband and the Sinking of Neutral Prizes, and the omission of an article to settle the question of Conversion of Merchantmen into Warships. I have dealt briefly in the Introduction and more fully in the Commentary with these objections, and I have tried to elucidate how the Declaration as a whole affects our position for the better. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.