are put to the most severe tasks red ants cover their bare legs, and draining marshes and clearing ground sometimes poisonous serpents twist "to break their spirits." They are about their ankles and inflict mortal conducted to their work by armed wounds. They stand in trenches up guards, who are ordered to fire at the to their knees in water and mire, and least attempt at flight. Hardly any try the exhalatious rising from the earth to escape, for they know that if they consume them with fever, or set their evade the bullets of the guards and teeth chattering as with cold, while the their pursuit, it will be necessary to sweat rolls from their foreheads. Occatraverse the sea and the virgin forest. sionally, in their despair, some of the At every step will lie in wait for them convicts revolt, in the hope, which is death by hunger, by fatigue, by disease, seldom disappointed, of finding in the or by the poisoned arrows of the na- bullets of their custodians a relief from tives, who receive a reward for every this living torture. Others again go convict they bring back, dead or alive. mad, or end their lives by deliberately Meanwhile, with bodies broken by exposing themselves to the sun, while their awful toil in a climate where a very few ever succeed in escaping. walk of a hundred yards is a formidable Indeed, only once have any fugitives task, they labor in the blazing sun with reached civilized countries again, aud spades and picks. About their heads even then their period of freedom was hang clouds of stinging insects. Great comparatively brief.

A MEGALITHIC VILLAGE IN ALGERIA. - In his new report on Algeria, Sir Lambert Playfair describes a visit which he made to the phosphate mines of Djebel Dyr, near Tebessa, in the course of which, he says, he saw a wonderful megalithic village. At about a kilometre from the house of the manager of the mines the mine tramway runs along the base of a cliff of shell limestone about two hundred and forty feet high. Below is a grassy slope covered with stones and boulders which have been detached from the hill above. Some of them are of great size, being eleven or twelve metres in circumference, and they have been hollowed out into chambers about two metres square at the base. A ledge of thirty centimetres square has been left on all the four sides, and the centre has been further excavated to a depth of about ten centimetres. Windows have been cut in the sides, and one can clearly see the groove into which a door was fitted. The interior height of the chambers is about two metres. The boulders are of shell limestone, not very diffi

cult to cut, but still so hard that the pick marks in the inside are as sharp as when first made. On the summit of the hill above are megalithic tombs of the ordinary type-large slabs supported by upright stones. Sir Lambert cannot quite make up his mind whether these excavated boulders are habitations or tombs like the others. The fact that undoubted tombs exist in the immediate vicinity at what would naturally be considered the proper distance for the cemetery of a village induces the belief that the boulders may be habitations. They are provided with windows and the groove for the door only exists to half its height, leaving the upper half of the aperture to be shut by a curtain or hanging of some kind. Some of the windows are rudely made; one was a nearly perfect ellipse placed high up in the wall, so as to serve also for a chimney. The interior dimensions are not much less than many of the native huts at the present day. The balance of evidence appears to him in favor of their having been intended as habitations.

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From The Fortnightly Review. INTERNATIONAL LAW IN THE WAR BETWEEN JAPAN AND CHINA.

THE great war in the extreme East has lasted not quite ten months. It has destroyed the reputation of one empire, and made that of another. In endless ways it has been full of instruction, but I propose to deal with it only in so far as it has illustrated the rules of international law. To the stu

dent of this science an outbreak of hostilities is always interesting. He knows that in war time the questions

bat; a question upon which some very random observations have appeared in the public press.2 Are China and Japan, with reference either to one another or to other powers, subject to the duties which are recognized as subsisting between the States of Europe? We come here upon a large question,

no less than the essential character of

com

international law, and the sphere of its operation. According to the older theory, no doubt, the law of nations was the law of Christendom; as little applicable to infidels as was the " with which he is concerned come mon law" of the Greek cities (тà Kowà thicker and faster than in time of rv Evwv vóμμa) to societies of barpeace, and that he can turn for their barians. The Reformation, by breaksolution, either directly or by analogy, ing up the religious unity of Europe not merely to the often ill-defined prac- obliged the jurists of those days to look tice of nations, or the frequently un- less and less to religion as the test of certain results of diplomatic discussions, subjection to what was later described but, in many cases, to clear and auas the "public law of Europe,” and thoritative decisions of courts of prize. of membership of the "family of naThe law of war, as is well known, tions." It came to be understood that consists of two great chapters, dealing the members of this "family "" are the respectively with the relations of one States of western Europe and their belligerent to the other, and with the derivatives in North and South Amerrelations of each belligerent to neu-ica, as sharers not so much in a com

trals.

The former topic has been under discussion for at least six centuries; for, not to mention classical antiquity, the literature of it may be traced from the canonists and casuists, through the dreamers of a law of nature, down to the positive systems of the present day. The latter topic is comparatively modern, dating, as a clearly defined subject of separate inquiry, only from the eighteenth century; though it has already come far to surpass in complexity and importance the law of belligerency.

I propose to call attention to some points in which each of these departments of international law has been illustrated by the war which has just been brought to a close. But, first of all, a word or two upon the applicability of international law to the nations which have been engaged in this com

1 It ended on 8th May, when the ratifications of the treaty signed at Shimonoseki on 17th April, were exchanged at Chefoo. During the armistice, the war, of course, continued to subsist: "Non pax est induciæ; bellum enim manet, pugna cessat."

and stock of moral ideas. That any
mon religion as in a common civilization
other States possess these qualifications
is not to be presumed, but needs to be
established from the special circum-
stances of each case. The accession of
the Oriental races to the law or
66 con-
cert" of Europe may be taken to have
begun by the formal admission into it
of the Ottoman Empire by the Treaty
of Paris of 1856. Since that date, the
maintenance of permanent diplomatic
intercourse between the European
courts and several powers of the re-
moter East, together with the increas-
ingly large number of treaties made
with such powers, and well observed by
them, have accustomed us to regard
these new-comers as belonging to the
charmed circle; though, perhaps, as
admitted to it only on probation.
Such might seem to be the position of

2 E.g., in the Saturday Review, 11th August, 1894: "There was no legal war. . . . The code of international law does not apply to barbarians, who have nothing of civilization beyond a chatter of words and a supply of deadly weapons." Cf. even the Law Journal, 1894, pp. 478, 513, 536.

Japan; but such could hardly be said | several purposes convenient, is not an to be the position of China; for China essential preliminary to legitimate waris far behind Japan in readiness to fare, and that, even when issued, it assimilate the ethical ideas of the may be followed by acts of hostility West, or to enter into the network of without an interval. For proof that treaties which so much facilitates the practice has been in accordance with social life of the world.1 In particular, theory, it will be enough to refer to the she has neglected to accede to the historical sketch of the subject which Geneva Convention for the treatment was prepared for the War Office by of the wounded, to which Japan long Colonel Maurice, when the possibility ago became a party; nor have her of this country being invaded without courts and codes any pretension so to notice by means of a Channel tunnel satisfy European requirements as to was under discussion. justify the Western powers in resigning, as they are about to do in the case of Japau,2 the extra-territorial privileges enjoyed in the empire by foreigners. Antecedently to the war, therefore, we should have said that Japan was admitted on probation, while China was only a candidate for admission, to the family of nations." Let us now see what further light has been thrown upon the respective qualifications of the two empires by subsequent events; and first with reference to the law of belligerency, where we have to consider: I. The declaration of war. II. The conduct of warfare. III. The commercia belli, i.e., such quasifriendly transactions as occur between enemies.

I. War was formally declared by Japan on 1st August, 1894, and the challenge was accepted in a counterdeclaration issued by China on the following day. But hostilities were already in progress. On 25th July, a Japanese squadron had been engaged with Chinese men-of-war which had been convoying transports carrying reinforcements for Asan, in Korea; and Japanese troops had captured Asan itself on the 29th. A state of war existed therefore between the two countries as early as 25th July; and there is nothing irregular in a war thus commenced. It has long been a settled doctrine of international law that a declaration, though laudable and for

1 E.g., the "universal conventions" as to weights| and measures, posts, and telegraphs.

2 Great Britain, by treaty with Japan of 16th July, 1894, provides for the cessation of such privileges after five years from that date. The United States and Italy have already followed suit.

II. With reference to the conduct of warfare, China has not accepted the customs, nor has she bound herself by the express conventious, which prevail among civilized nations. The signal made by Admiral Ting, before the battle off the Yalu, "If the enemy shows the white flag, or hoists the Chinese ensign, give no quarter, but continue firing at her till she is sunk," need, therefore, occasion no surprise. Sung, the imperial commissioner, is stated to have posted notices in northern Manchuria, offering ten thousand taels for the decapitation of three Japanese generals; and it seems to be established that the Chinese commanders habitually offered and paid rewards for the heads and hands of prisoners, who might indeed be accounted fortunate if they escaped a fate far worse than instantly inflicted death. It was the torture and mutilation of those Japanese who happened to be made prisoners during the operations against Port Arthur which stung their fellow-countrymen into madness, and explains, though nothing can excuse, the massacres which were carried on by them for four days after the place was taken.

6

3 See Lord Ellenborough in Orme v. Bruce, 12 and the Eliza Anne, 1 Dods. 247; Betts, J., in the East, 226; Lord Stowell in the Nayada, 4 Rob. 253, Hiawatha, 1 Blatch.

4 Statement by Captain McGiffen of the ChenYuen.

Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, 12th April, 1895.

6 Claims on this account are said to have been found among the papers of a Chinese general, and Mr. Hart, correspondent of the New York World, saw payments made for heads in the governor's yamen at Port Arthur.