Feb, 23.
We welcome Mr. Fessenden's "even seems, by quoting without comment ® passage from Bynkershoek, in which soldiers are classed with arms and other articles of use in war, to favour the view that at least persons who are in the military service of the state may be treated as contraband."
That is the passage which really covers the case of the China and Mr. Fessenden does not quote it. Nor does he quote the following "Tt is to be regretted that Lord Russell did not address himeelf to the refutation of the doctrine that persons can be contraband of war''—a clear admission that, in the passage Mr. Fessenden quotes, Hall was merely giving an opinion. Lord Russell, of course, knew very well what he was about. letter, published to-day, as it provides an opportunity of clearing up several misunderstandings prevalent in connexion with a subject that is naturally being good deal discussed. Of those misunderstandings Mr. Fessenden presents three "conspicuous examples. He totally ignores the distinction between diplomatic persons (such as those carried on board the Trent) and contraband persons (euch as those captured on the China). He quotes the Trent case as parallel to the China, which it is not in any respect. Finally, the principles for which England contended in the Trent case" are not summed up by Hall, in the paragraph quoted by Mr. Fessenden, as Hall is there only expressing an opinion on a point on which Lord Russell carefully did not touch in his correspondence with the United States.
Let us recall the facts of the Trent case, which, after all, are not so "well known to Americans'' but that Mr. Fessenden is in some apparent error about them. In 1861, during the American civil war, Mr. Mason and Mr. Slidell were proceeding as envoys from the Southern Confederacy to Great Britain and France, on board the British mail steamer Trent, when they were captured by the Federal frigate San Jacinto. The United States vainly contended that the object of their mission rendered it s hostile one (we special-
Now on this matter of contraband persons, let us turn to Pitt Cobbett, whose ''Leading Cases on International Law"? was published in 1913, twenty-three years later than, we believe, the last edition of Hall. After referring to the Trent case with approval, he enumerates two important qualifications Of these the first is set up by the Hague Convention, No. 10 of 1907, which authorizes the seizure by a belligerent of enemy sick or wounded found on board neutral hospital ships or merchant ships. The second is contained in the Declaration of London, 1909, which provi that any individual embodied in the armed forces of the enemy who is found on board @ neutral merchant vessel may be made prisoner of war.
A fortiori, if sick and wounded may be taken from neutral merchants, how much more number of healthy young men who, in the case of the China, included a number of officers escaping from Siberia? There is all the difference in the world between dipplomatic envoys going from the sphere of hostilities, and men of military age returning to it—as much difference, indeed, as between the ipso dizit of Mr. Fes-sender and the simple facts of history and international law.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.