quest of her revolted transatlantic colonies, and joined with the vigorous measures of Mr. Canning, then Foreign Secretary of Great Britain, inflicted a fatal blow upon the prestige of the Holy Alliance. Humanity. § 87. Humanitarian interventions and interventions for the purpose of putting an end to religious persecution may be classified together; for the cruelties due to intolerance come under the general head of proceedings repugnant to humanity. It is easy to see that the right of a state to work out its own destiny in its own way would no longer exist, if International Law gave to other states a general right of interference whenever they were horrified at cruelties committed in the course of a war or an internal struggle. All sorts of ambitious projects would be able to shelter themselves behind an alleged feeling of humanity; for unfortunately there are few, if any, civil wars in which a greater or less amount of cruelty is not resorted to. But, as we have already discovered,1 interventions on the ground of humanity have under very exceptional circumstances a moral, though not a legal, justification. It is generally held that the interference of Great Britain, France and Russia on behalf of the Greeks in 1827 and the following years is a case in point. The contest between them and their Turkish oppressors had gone on for years, and had been marked throughout by the most horrible barbarities. It seemed as if it would end in the extermination of the whole Greek race. The intervention of the three powers preserved a people to whom civilization owed so much, and laid the foundation of a new order in Southeastern Europe, which, with all its defects, is infinitely preferable to the chaos of weltering barbarism that immediately preceded it. Again, when in 1860 the Great Powers intervened to put a stop to the persecution and massacre of Christians in the district of Mount Lebanon, 1 See § 74. 2 Wheaton, History of the Law of Nations, Pt. IV., § 28. their proceedings were worthy of commendation, though they could not be brought within the strict letter of the law; and the same may probably be said of the indirect intervention whereby in 1878 the signatory powers of the Treaty of Berlin recognized the independence of Montenegro, Roumania and Servia, on condition that no person in those states should be under legal disability on account of his religious belief, or suffer molestation in the public worship prescribed by his creed.1 § 88. intervention. We have now gone through the various classes into which interventions may be divided. For the sake of clearness, we have treated each separate case as if it came Complication under one or another of these heads and under of most cases of that alone. But in actual life matters are not so simple. The same intervention often possesses a variety of aspects, and attempts are made to justify it on several grounds. The formation of a judgment upon it is difficult in proportion to its complication. Few international proceedings of recent years have been more bitterly attacked and more strongly defended than the present British intervention in Egypt, which has been carried on with armed force ever since 1882. It involves for Great Britain questions of self-interest with regard to the Suez Canal, questions of national honor with regard to the promises made to Tewfik Pasha in 1879, questions of good government with regard to the suppression of the Arabist movement and the reform of the administration, questions of finance with regard to the Egyptian debt, and questions of the rights of other states in connection with the dual control which was shared with France, and the suspension of the Law of Liquidation which was signed by no less than fourteen powers.2 It will not be necessary to enter into the controversies which this 1 Holland, European Concert in the Eastern Question, pp. 293–301. intervention has aroused. We have.referred to it in order to show how complicated such a proceeding can be, and how at every turn it involves disputes on matters of fact as well as legal principles. Moreover, several states may be concerned in one and the same intervention, and they may be actuated by different motives and put forth different justifications. Every case must be judged on its own merits in the light of the principles we have already laid down. We may add to them a few others, which, though not rules of International Law, will be found useful guides to correct conclusions. From what has been already said it follows, as a corollary, that interventions in the internal affairs of states are greater infringements of their independence than interferences with their external action, which must, from the nature of the case, be concerned with other powers. Such interventions, therefore, should be watched with the utmost jealousy, and require the strongest reasons in order to justify them. Further, interventions carried on by the Great Powers as the representatives of European civilization, or by some state or states acting as their agent, are more likely to be just and beneficial than interventions carried on by one power only. But history seems to show that when two or three states combine in a temporary alliance for the purpose of regulating the affairs of some neighbor, they not only possess none of the moral authority attaching to the proceedings of the Great Powers, but are exceedingly likely to quarrel among themselves. England and Spain, for instance, soon withdrew from the unjustifiable intervention in Mexico, which they had undertaken in 1861 in conjunction with France, for the avowed purpose of obtaining from the Mexican Government payment of its debts to their subjects and better protection for foreigners resident in Mexico. In 1862 France began to give aid to the Imperialists, contrary to the terms of the convention between the intervening powers. The other two parties to the intervention, finding themselves in a false position, declined to proceed, and France, left to herself, placed the Archduke Maximilian of Austria upon a precarious throne, which he lost, together with his life, in 1867.1 The case of the intervention of the German Confederation in the Schleswig-Holstein question in 1864 is a more conspicuous warning still; for it ended in the war of 1866 between Austria and Prussia, the two chief intervening powers. § 89. So prone are powerful states to interfere in the affairs of others, and so great are the evils of interference, that a doctrine of absolute non-intervention has been put The doctrine of forth as a protest against incessant meddling, non-intervention. If this doctrine means that a state should do nothing but mind its own concerns and never take an interest in the affairs of other states, it is fatal to the idea of a family of nations. If, on the other hand, it means that a state should take an interest in international affairs, and express approval or disapproval of the conduct of its neighbors, but never go beyond moral suasion in its interference, it is foolish. To scatter abroad protests and reproaches, and yet to let it be understood that they will never be backed by force of arms, is the surest way to get them treated with angry contempt. Neither selfish isolation nor undignified remonstrance is the proper attitude for honorable and self-respecting states. They should intervene very sparingly, and only on the clearest grounds of justice and necessity; but when they do intervene, they should make it clear to all concerned that their voice must be attended to and their wishes carried out.2 1 Wheaton's International Law (Dana's ed.), note 41; Calvo, Droit International, §§ 118-125. 2 See Appendix, § II., for the recent intervention of the United States in Cuba, and of Great Britain in the affairs of the South African Republic. CHAPTER II. RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS CONNECTED WITH PROPERTY. States are political units capable of holding both territorial pos sessions. § 90. INTERNATIONAL Law regards states as political units possessed of proprietary rights over definite portions of the earth's surface.1 So entirely is its conception of a state bound up with the notion of territorial possesterritorial and non- sion that it would be impossible for a nomadic tribe, even if highly organized and civilized, to come under its provisions. The whole Law of Jurisdiction, much of the Law of Diplomacy, and many of the rules that govern war and neutrality, imply that the communities subject to them have sovereign rights over territory. But a state may hold non-territorial as well as territorial possessions; and it will be well to deal with them at once, in order that we may dismiss them from further consideration, and go on to consider the important questions connected with national ownership of land and water. The non-territorial possessions of a state are its buildings and chattels. Every civilized and independent political community possesses in greater or less abundance such things as palaces, museums, ships, forts, arsenals, arms, ammunition, pictures and jewels. They belong to it in its corporate capacity; and most questions which arise with regard to the right of ownership over them, or the right to use and enjoy them, are settled by Municipal Law. We refer, for instance, to the law of the land, and not to International Law, when we want to know when we may visit a national art gallery, or what compulsory 1 An able statement of the contrary view, that sovereignty is distinct from property, will be found in Westlake's International Law, Chapter IX. The controversy turns on a conflict of analogies. |