applied in the United States, would not be limited in their courts.[1] Therefore, although the English law may have contemplated the limitation of the British shipowners' liability, any damage sustained by collision on the high seas between a British ship and a foreign vessel, would not fall within the statutory limit, and, practically, the liability of the British shipowner, in the event of loss of life, would be unlimited, or at least co-extensive with the loss, which a jury might assess according to the rank of life and the injuries sustained by the relatives and families of the deceased. It was further recommended that the practicability and desirability of an international arrangement with maritime countries,[2] so as to arrive at some uniform reciprocal principles, should be seriously considered by Government.
Burden of light dues. The incidence of the light dues paid by the Shipowners of the Empire, necessarily received consideration from the Committee, more especially as it was
- ↑ Since 1860 the law has been altered so far that the responsibility of foreign ships in our courts is limited on the same conditions, and to the same amount, as British ships, and these are now limited in the States, as well as in the Federal Court of the United States.
- ↑ When I visited the United States after Parliament rose that session (1860), the question of responsibility was one, to which, with others, I invited the attention of the Shipowners of that country at various meetings, with their chambers of Commerce and Boards of Trade, which were frequently held in public. As the whole of these questions refer directly to merchant shipping and seamen, I have given in the Appendix of this work, No. 2, p. 567, a copy of a letter I addressed to Lord Lyons on my arrival in Boston (U.S.), which embraces the whole of them, as also a subsequent correspondence which I had in 1866 with our Foreign Office (see Appendix No. 3, p. 571), on the subject of the then unsatisfactory state of our relations with America, with regard to the responsibility of British Shipowners when sued in their State Courts. I have the less hesitation in giving this correspondence as it has not hitherto been published, and as some of the questions in my letter to Lord Lyons still wait solution.
