Note 346 — Chapter I · STATE TERRITORY

I have no reason to alter the above statement, although Lord Fitzmaurice declared in the House of Lords on February 21, 1907, in the name of the British Government, that they considered such bays only to be territorial as possessed an entrance not wider than six miles. The future will have to show whether Great Britain and her self-governing colonies consider themselves bound by this statement. No writer of authority can be quoted in favour of it, although Walker (§ 18) and Wilson and Tucker (5th ed., 1910, § 53) state it. Westlake (vol. I. p. 187) cannot be cited in favour of it, since he distinguishes between bays and gulfs in such a way as is not generally done by international lawyers, and as is certainly not recognised by geography; for the very examples which he enumerates as gulfs are all called bays, namely those of Conception, of Cancale, of Chesapeake, and of Delaware. In the North Atlantic Coast Fisheries case, between the United States and Great Britain, which was decided by the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Hague in 1910, the United States—see the official publication of the case, p. 136—also contended that only such bays could be considered territorial as possessed an entrance not wider than six miles, but the Court refused to agree to this contention.