It would not be possible to understand, much less to state clearly, the origin, nature, and extent of the so-called Doctrine of Continuous Voyages without explaining, even in a succinct manner, the causes that contributed to the statement of this famous principle. There is hardly anything in the field of social conceptions that is not in some way or other connected with the past. For this reason when we want to ascertain the principles that obtained in a period gone by it is imperatively necessary that our inquiries should start from an age even more remote, so that the light of history may clear the paths that we intend to explore. During the middle of the eighteenth century nothing was heard of the doctrine which we attempt now to expound; it was only at the end of that century that its first manifestations appeared. But the examination of the navigation laws of the times and of the principles of international law that regulated the intercourse between neutrals and belligerents would at once suggest that the prohibition which the doctrine embraced is dependent on or complementary to the so-called “Rule of war of 1756.”

On February 4, 1915, the German Admiralty published the following decree:

The doctrine of servitudes as it stands at present in international law is in a very incoherent state. From the Roman law the concept, with an elaborate set of rules for its operation but with no philosophic or theoretical development, was transmitted at the time of “the Reception” to the semi-feudal jus publicum of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the doctrine was taken over by the developing jus gentium.

This experience, this double growing over from private law to public law and thence to international law, has sadly shattered the doctrine. The modifications made by feudal and dynastic and mercantilist manipulation have warped the concept out of all symmetry. Indeed, it is possible that traits picked up en route have ruined the doctrine for modern use.

By the common law an alien is a subject of a foreign state who has not been born within the allegiance of the King: he is counted an alien friend if his sovereign or state is at peace, an alien enemy if his sovereign or state is at war with the King. By the Naturalization Act of 1870 an alien may: (1) take, acquire, hold and dispose of real and personal property of every description in the same manner in all respects as a natural-born British subject; (2) after five years’ residence in the United Kingdom and on giving proof that he intends to reside in the kingdom or serve under the Crown, obtain a certificate of naturalization by which he becomes entitled to all political and other rights, powers and privileges and subject to all obligations to which a natural-born British subject in the United Kingdom is subject, with the qualification that he may not be deemed a British subject within the limits of the country of his original allegiance, if, according to its laws, he has not ceased to be a subject of that state. (This last provision has been abrogated by the new Nationality Act of 1914, which came into operation in January.)