Mr. BEECHER. Quite likely.

Mr. CAMPBELL. But these words "governs the rights of the carrier and the holder of the bill of lading" would apply to the issuance of the bill of lading at all times.

Mr. BEECHER. As I am told by those more learned in the law than I, the bill of lading, while still held by the charterer, is simply a receipt, and its provisions govern the rights of the carrier and of the holder of the bill of lading, but reference must be had to the charter as well. Do you differ on that?

Mr. ENGLAR. That certainly is true where there is any conflict between the charter and the bill of lading.

Mr. CAMPBELL. Then that uncertainty could be cleared up by leaving the words "is negotiated" in and not making the substitution.

Mr. BEECHER. It is not a substitution. As I have said, this is my understanding of the correct translation of the French which we agreed to, and unless you can point out some respect in which this does not carry out the intention as I have expressed it, or does not carry out that which you feel ought to be provided, I can see no reason for substituting the language used in the unofficial British translation for the language which the convention adopted.

Mr. CAMPBELL. It only goes to show if you are going to have uniformity that then we have to wait until the official translation comes out. If the English translate those words "is negotiated," and you translate them "governs the rights of the carrier and of the holder of the bill of lading," it is certain you do not agree, and that they do not mean the same thing.

Mr. HAIGHT. May I explain that translation? Judge Hough advises me the translation which appears in the British publication is really a mistake; that it was the phraseology considered at one part of the deliberations and subsequently abandoned, and I have here the official French and its translation. As Judge Hough told me, the official English translation which was agreed to was this:

From the moment at which such bill of lading regulates the relations between the carrier and the holder of the same.

Instead of

66* * *

governs the rights of the carrier and of the holder of the bill of lading." It has absolutely the same meaning.

Mr. BEECHER. It is just a case of tweedle dee and tweedle dum.

Mr. HAIGHT. Precisely; it has the same meaning, only Judge Hough wrote me that is the official English translation, of which I brought one copy back to America. But the French is clearly that in meaning, and has no reference at all to the negotiation of the bill.

Mr. CAMPBELL. Will you give that to us again?

Mr. HAIGHT. Yes. Judge Hough's translation, which I understand is the official English translation, reads as follows:

66

From the moment at which such bill of lading regulates the relations between the carrier and the holder of the same."

Mr. BLAND. Can not we have a translation prepared by our State Department here or by some official?

Mr. BEECHER. The translation has been gone over by the State Department.
Mr. BLAND. What translation?

Mr. BEECHER. I should say that the French text has been translated by the State Department. It has been compared with the unofficial British translation and an effort is now being made to agree with the British upon an official translation.

Mr. CAMPBELL. Was this an official English translation or an unofficial English translation?

Mr. BEECHER. Unofficial. There is no official English translation and will be none, as I understand it, until England and America have reached an agreement as to what that translation shall be.

Mr. CAMPBELL. That is just it. They ought to agree as to the translation of that French.

Mr. BEECHER. Right.

Mr. CAMPBELL. And we have not that before us.

Mr. BEECHER. Right.

Mr. CAMPBELL. You do not know what that will be.

Mr. BEECHER. No; but this, I think, is the only point upon which there is any difference of the slighest moment, and this is of no moment, because it means exactly the same thing, so far as any lawyer here can state.

STATEMENT OF MR. CHARLES S. HAIGHT, CHAIRMAN OF THE BILL OF LADING COMMITTEE OF THE INTERNATIONAL CHAMBER OF COMMERCE.

The CHAIRMAN. Give us your name and address and state whom you represent. Mr. HAIGHT. Charles S. Haight, 27 William Street, New York City. I am chairman of the bill of lading committee of the International Chamber of Commerce. speak for the International Chamber and for no one else.

I

The International Chamber has been more than interested in the problem of reaching, if possible, a solution of the long-standing controversy between the carriers and the shippers, cargo underwriters, and bankers. They have felt that a free transportation of the world's commodities is the most important single feature of our international life and that something should be done, if it is humanly possible, to eliminate the friction which has been developed for the last 30 years in that important branch. Mr. BLAND. May I inquire what this International Chamber of Commerce is and who composes it?

Mr. HAIGHT. The International Chamber of Commerce throughout the world seeks to perform the same functions that the United States Chamber seeks to perform in the United States. It is an international organization which has as its constituent members chambers of commerce of all the countries of the world-merchants' associations, boards of trade, and large international traders. It meets once a year or every two years in international conferences to discuss questions, such as this, which are thought to be of vital importance to international trade.

The conference at which the bill-of-lading matter was taken up was held in London in May, 1921. The International Chamber in a few weeks will have another international conference at Rome, to which the president of the United States Chamber of Commerce and many of our most distinguished American commercial leaders are going, and, in fact, have already sailed.

Mr. BLAND. Has it permanent headquarters anywhere?

Mr. HAIGHT. It has permanent headquarters in Paris.

Mr. BLAND. Who are the officers?

Mr. HAIGHT. Mr. H. M. Clemenceau, one of the most distinguished statesmen and commercial men, is president; Mr. A. C. Bedford is the American vice president, and men of that caliber are taking a very active interest in its work.

Mr. BLAND. Has it any headquarters in this country?

Mr. HAIGHT. It has headquarters with the United States chamber in the Mills Building, here in Washington.

Mr. BLAND. What countries are represented in it here?

Mr. HAIGHT. Perhaps Mr. Redpath can give you that better than I can. give you a great many of the names of the countries-Great Britain, FranceMr. BLAND. You can insert that.

I can

Mr. HAIGHT. I should say practically every country of the world of importance to-day, except China and Russia, is represented. There may be some South American countries not in it, but all of the great countries are in it.

(The list of countries furnished by Mr. Haight is as follows:)

COUNTRIES THE COMMERCIAL INTERESTS OF WHICH ARE REPRESENTED THROUGH MEMBERSHIP IN THE INTERNATIONAL CHAMBER OF COMMERCE.

Mr. HAIGHT. The present conditions governing ocean bills of lading rae, as everybody knows, completely unsatisfactory. They have been becoming more and more so as years pass. Every country in the world to-day has a different law. I think, without a single exception, every steamship company in the world almost has a different form of bill of lading and some companies have many different forms of bills of lading.

The result has been that no one, whether he was loaning money against a shipping document or was an insurer of goods in transit, could tell what his risks were or what his rights were. The shipper at all times practically has to take what is given to him. In the time of the war the steamship owner could offer any form of bill of lading he liked, and the shipper had to accept. On the other hand, when times radically changed, as they are to-day, the shipper is the man who holds the whip hand, and I said in London, and I still believe, that with half of the tonnage of the

world tied up, any shipper who wanted to could get a form of bill of lading that had in it a paragraph of the Magna Charta or a page from Alice in Wonderland, if only he would write a paying freight rate.

Now these wide variations never settle any troubles at all, and the international chamber has been doing its utmost to bring all of the parties together about one table, with the purpose of securing a friendly and a fair agreement. We do not believe that legislation, per se and alone, will ever settle this trouble, because when you legislate votes are the only things that count, and if the steamship owners happen to be in preponderance,.they get it voted their way; or if the shippers have the whip hand, they get it voted their way, and you never get it settled.

There have been protests heard from all over the world during the last 30 years, and they have been gradually becoming much more emphatic and the protests that have been directed (before this committee in Washington, before the House of Commons and elsewhere, and before the House of Deputies in Paris) have almost entirely been confined to three definite heads.

The shipper has said that it is not fair for the steamship owner to limit his value per package, in case of admitted liability and fault, to a figure which is wholly disproportionate to the damage he has sustained. Mr. Englar has known of at least one bill of lading where a French company limited its liability in case of fault to 10 francs per package. We have seen in America $100, and less. And, naturally, the man who ships a package worth $1,000 and which has an admitted worth of $100 and is then told they will give him a check for $10, resents it.

The second definite complaint has been of the claims clause and, under the present conditions, the claims clause means this, that if you do not present your claim within a given number of days, within a very short time, and if you do not bring suit within 30 days, or perhaps 60 days, you have no right of action at all; you are barred.

Mr. EDMONDS. That is, notwithstanding the goods may be lying in the customhouse for a month before you can get them examined, sometimes, like they did in Cuba a short time ago?

Mr. HAIGHT. There may be many cases in which the consignee honestly has an opportunity to examine the goods before the consignment gets to him; although in Norway, I presume, you can not start the time running until the delivery has been made to the consignee.

The third complaint was that of the burden of proof of pilferage and other things. A man inserts in his bill of lading "I am not responsible for rust, sweat, vermin" or 40 other different causes, and he delivers his goods rusted, and the consignee seeks to recover damages, the shipowner refers to the bill of lading and says "I am not responsible for rust, unless you can prove we neglected your shipment." The shipper says "I can not prove anything; I was not aboard your boat. Why, very well," says the shipowner, "if you can not prove we neglected your shipment, I am not liable." Those three complaints—burden of proof, claims clause, and value per package—have been threshed out over and over again, and the contest became so heated that finally, in England, in that great steamship-owning country, they had to listen. They had always said the steamship owner has full freedom of contract; he can put into his bill of lading anything the other side will accept; but eventually, before the war was over, an imperial shipping committee was appointed by Great Britain to study the whole problem. Witnesses were heard from all walks of life-the banker, the cargo underwriter, the shipper, and the steamship owner-and in the end that committee filed a report recommending that all legislation throughout the British Empire be wiped out clean; that is, that they start afresh with the Harter Act, adopting our American law, which had been copied in England, Australia, and New Zealand, but every time it was copied, it was copied with some changes. So the British Empire said "We have reached a point where the shippers have got to be given greater protection, and the way to do it is to stop these clauses which exempt the carrier from all liability, and to make our law uniform.

It was then that the International Law Association and, a little later, the International Chamber of Commerce, took up the movement, and our opinion was this, that when Great Britain had reached that stage of being willing to adopt the American law, with these other three advantages which everybody is clamoring for, we then had so much of the world practically standing together that the right thing to do was to seek international uniformity and not merely British and American uniformity. So that an effort was made to codify, really, our American Harter Act.

You gentlemen, who are lawyers, will understand that the Harter Act is superimposed upon the common law. It means nothing to the French to say certain clauses are allowed and other clauses are prohibited; they do not know what that means with reference to the carriers, nor why it is necessary. What he may exempt himself from and what he may not they want stated in plain terms. So that the Harter Act

was codified into the form of The Hague rules, but the three points I have referred to were not covered. They said they would let the carrier limit his liability to £100 per package, or virtually the equivalent of $500. It has been conceded by every one that we must take one kind of money, which fluctuates as little as possible, instead of having the Italians say lira, the English say pounds, the American say dollars, the German say marks, and the Russian say rubles, and you do not know where you are. The money which is most commonly used and the best known in international trade is perhaps the best one to pick for all the nations of the world to agree upon. They ought to agree upon one denomination, and the most stable we can get.

£100 Mr. Beecher thinks is probably too much of a burden on the steamship owner, and I think so, too. I think that £100 is more than the value of the average package: but we can only say that the steamship owners and the cargo representatives fought it out, first at The Hague and again in London, and the European cargo people, and I suppose the American cargo people, feel if the steamship owners want to give us £100 per package as the limit we are going to agree with them, and the steamship owners have finally said, "Very well; we surrender; we concede." But it is not so much of a burden on the steamship owner, if only every steamship owner has exactly the same responsibility. They are then on an absolute equality from a competitive standpoint and. if it costs them more, they raise their freight rate. We saw bunker coal go from $3 a ton to $27 a ton during the war. It did not stop any steamship company from doing business; they all had to pay the same price, and they added it to the freight

rate.

On the claims clause the difficulty has been reached, I think, fairly, and I really would like to have you gentlemen look at that claims clause once more. I think there is a complete misapprehension on the part of some of you. Here is the law to-day, that if you do not present a notice of claim, a formal notice, that you are going to sue within a few days, and if you fail to bring suit within perhaps 30 days you are barred entirely, no matter what the facts are. Under The Hague rules of the present code, no matter what the facts are, you can bring your suit within 12 months after the delivery of the damaged goods; but if you have, as consignee, received the goods and given a clean receipt for the goods and taken them away, then when you sue for damage you must prove that the damage did not really occur after you took them away; that the damage did not occur while the goods were in your hands. Now, that is just as reasonable and fair as anything can be, as I see it. If I take a case of shoes, we will say, away from the carrier and give him a clean receipt and I store them in my warehouse for six months and then I open them and I find four pairs of shoes have been stolen, they might just as well have been stolen in the warehouse as on the steamship company's ship; but all I have to prove is that I put them in my warehouse and put them in a room, with the door locked, and which had never been opened until the time the theft was discovered.

Mr. BLAND. Suppose your shoes are sent out to Kansas City; they are taken off of the ship at New York and sent to Kansas City, and you have no means of examining them until they get to Kansas City?

Mr. HAIGHT. You have to prove between the time that case was delivered to you on the dock in New York and you receipted for it clean, and the time it was opened in Kansas City, that it was never tampered with; and you certainly should be required to do that, or the steamship company could be robbed right and left.

If I may stop a moment to interpolate, I will tell you how that works in shoes. One of our American shippers carrying shoes to South America had had claim after claim made on them for short delivery and they paid them. Finally, one day, this same shipper delivered a dozen cases of shoes on his dock. He telephoned his shipping clerk and said, "Come down here." The man said "What do you want to see me for?" He said, “I want to see you; come down.” He said, "What do you want of me?" He said, "I will tell you what I want of you when you come down." So when the man went down he said, "You have just delivered 12 cases of shoes. I want you to stand on my dock while the coopers open every case; I want to see what is in them," and there was no a single case that did not have from two to three or four pairs of shoes missing.

Now, those things happen and it is only fair that the steamship owner, who has delivered his goods and received a clean receipt for them, should be entitled to say to the man who took the goods away and who comes back six months later and says, "something has been stolen out of that box"-it is only fair to say that the consignee should be required to prove they were not stolen after the time he gave the receipt. Mr. BLAND. At the same time, doesn't it put a very heavy burden upon him where he has no opportunity to ascertain that unless he opens up every case in New York? Shouldn't we make that a distributive loss?

Mr. HAIGHT. The burden has to rest upon somebody, and I have always insisted that the burden should rest upon the man who can protect himself, and not upon the

man who absolutely can not. When the carrier has goods, it is his business to police his dock and to police his ship, and, if they are stolen then without his fault, somebody must bear the loss and he is the most logical man to do it; but, when he has parted with the goods and he has no possible means of guarding them any longer, the man whose duty it is to guard them should, I think, be held responsible.

Mr. BLAND. In other words, you fix the responsibility upon the last carrier, and the last carrier would go back upon the next carrier, and the next carrier would then go back upon the steamship company?

Mr. HAIGHT. It will fix the responsibility always upon the man who holds the goods of proving that the damage did not occur while they were in his possession, in that situation, if he is trying to hold somebody else.

Mr. CAMPBELL. Is not that a part of the insurable risk and ought to be carried by the insurers?

Mr. HAIGHT. I agree it is an insurable risk, and of course the carrier will insure himself; but I think the responsibility should fairly be placed upon the man who can reduce the risk of the loss. If you make the loss payable by the underwriters, then nobody cares who pays, except your underwriter, and the risk of carelessness is increased. The mate of a ship is not so much annoyed when he finds Del Monte canned goods served up to him on a long voyage if he thinks, "Well, my boss does not care; the underwriters will pay for the opened package"; but if he thinks his boss has to pay the loss and that he will then lose his job, then it presents a different situation. Mr. CAMPBELL. Under your theory, it would not work that way; the ship owner would have to insure, and he would have to charge that insurance back in the freight

rates.

Mr. HAIGHT. Yes; but the rates of insurance will always be fixed on the moral hazzard, so that, just as some steamship companies get a much better rate on marine and other risks than others do, the company that holds its losses down will benefit by so doing.

Mr. CAMPBELL. No, not at all; because all of those risks are carried in P. & I. associations, which are mutual associations where everybody pays on the same basis. Mr. HAIGHT. Isn't it true, Mr. Campbell, that some people will not be admitted in the P. & I. association at all?

Mr. CAMPBELL. I assume so, but he has to be a pretty bad character.

Mr. HAIGHT. There are such.

Mr. CAMPBELL. I am not prepared to admit there are no American steamship owners who would not be admitted.

Mr. EDMONDS. As attorney for a P. & I. association, you know that is so, though. (Laughter.)

Mr. PAUL. On page 4, line 19, it now reads if the loss or damage is not apparent, the notice must be given.

Mr. HAIGHT. Yes.

Mr. PAUL. Wouldn't it clarify matters a little bit to insert if the loss or damage is not apparent at the time of delivery, or at the time of the removal of the goods from the custody of the carrier?

Mr. HAIGHT. I will admit I am exceedingly anxious to see these rules adopted as they were agreed to by the 24 separate commercial nations; because, if we begin to change and somebody else begins to change, and everybody takes a hand at changing them, then the work we have been doing, off and on, for 10 years and continuously for the last 20 months, is all thrown in the discard and we have to begin all over again. And, for one, I am fairly tired of my job and I want to see it finished. It is important, therefore, to hold to the phraseology if we can.

Now let us read the whole clause and not one sentence of it.

"Unless notice of loss or damage and the general nature of such loss or damage be given in writing to the carrier or his agent at the port of discharge before or at the time of the removal of the goods into the custody of the person entitled to delivery thereof under the contract of carriage, such removal shall be prima facie evidence of the delivery by the carrier of the goods as described in the bill of lading.

In other words, the man who gives a clean receipt or who accepts his goods without the slightest complaint, must admit that he has at least received them clean, according to his own admission; but, if it is a damage which can only be ascertained by opening your box, he is not required to do that the moment the goods are delivered to him but he is given an additional three days within which to examine his goods and his; receipt for the goods, where the damage is concealed, does not even act as prima facie evidence of a clean receipt.

Mr. PERLMAN. It will take three days.

Mr. HAIGHT. When the three days have expired, then he is in the position only, of having given a clean receipt for the goods, which binds him to what-merely, if sub