Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Chapter II. The Baltic Minorities' Rights. Their relation to Municipal and International Law. Lecture delivered at the Grotius Society in London, November 1921
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people of alien extraction is also directed against the Exchange
Committee and the Exchange bank of Riga. It is said that the exchange
should be exclusively in the hands of „the reigning people“. Thus,
government and press in Latvia and Eesti emulate each other in
promoting the most uncompromising tribalism, reinforced by Socialism,
anti-democratic in its practical application, inimical to personal freedom,
reactionary in its intolerance. The argument that they, the Letts and
Ests, were the first arrivals in the country and therefore merit a
privileged position in comparison with the alien races of the minorities, is
not consistent with the principle of equality. Tribalism, in such a garb,
bears the stamp of an exclusiveness and intolerance which was
characteristic of the Boors towards the Africanders, and finally brought
the Transvaal Republic to its downfall. Even the great Russian Empire
was over-thrown, partly because it mismanaged and tyrannised its
racial and religious minorities: Russia will only be resurrected in power
again, when personal liberty and racial and religious tolerance are
conceded as a conditio sine qua non of its constitution. According to the
principles of modern municipal law, citizenship is acquired by birth or
by the naturalisation of each individual, the history of forebears,
centuries old, not being taken into consideration. Again a State which de
facto, has a mixed population of different races cannot be allowed to
expulse people from their territory, who had acquired their legal
domicile in the country before the State came into existence. Yet such a
breach of the law of nations has actually occured in Latvia where scores
of people have been deprived of their estates and expelled from the
country although they had acquired there their legal domicile before
Latvia had been constituted an independent State, for the simple reason
that they did not belong to the Lettish race. These people had come
from the interior of Russia.
It is a postulate of reason to conform to the ideas of right of those
whose support is solicited. Since England has taken so active a part
in founding the Republics of Latvia and Eesti and is, up to the present,
ready to protect these States, Latvia and Eesti have every inducement
not to imperil this support by assuming an anti-democratic tribalism,
which is incomprehensible and offensive to the English. If the Lettish
and Estonian peoples assume a privileged attitude on the strength of the
fact that they came to the Baltic lands before the Baltic minorities, by
the same process of argument, the Gaelic natives of the British Isles
should demand precedence of the Anglo-Saxons and Normans. Likewise,
the American Red Indians might set themselves up to be the free-men
of the United States and thereby claim special concessions. Can the
Basques and Celtic-Gauls aspire to priority and exceptional advantages
of position, on the ground that they were inhabitants of French
territory long before the Franks came to the country and founded France?
In Public law as well as in Common law, there is the title of
acquisition by specification. As in Great Britain, America and France, so in
the Baltic countries, a „specification“ has, de facto, taken place, for
virgin forests have been cleared, towns founded, ways of communication
opened up, knowledge and culture spread and the Christian religion
introduced — in a word, civilisation has converted pre-historic
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