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firms or companies, with the tyre company's corporate premises later
occupied by the Army Council79.
Life was also very difficult for naturalized British subjects who had
formerly been citizens of enemy nations and who were now detained
without trial, on the ground that the minister deemed it expedient for the
public safety and for the defence of the realm to detain a person "of hostile
origin or associations". Such individuals could not expect to look to the
courts to help them obtain their release from prison despite the proud claim
of the common law that the writ of habeas corpus was an english foundation of liberty. Arthur Zadig, for example, had been born in Germany in
1871 and had become naturalized British in 1905. regulation 14B, authorizing his detention, was declared intra vires by four of the five House of
Lords judges, even though the primary statute, DorA, did not grant an
explicit power of executive detention. of the five Law Lords hearing
the appeal, only the Scottish judge, Lord Shaw, dissented from the view
that the minister's decision was immune from legal challenge, with the
majority not requiring the minister to satisfy the court that he had acted
reasonably in a legal sense by showing that he had acted bona fide and
that he possessed prima facie grounds to intern without trial in order to
maintain "public safety and the defence of the realm", as the wording of
the regulation authorizing internment had stated. Indeed Lord Shaw, in
his dissent, described the government as a present-day (that is, in 1917)
Committee of Public Safety (Comité sur la Sécurité Publique), but with
powers "far more arbitrary than those of the most famous Committee on
Public Safety known to history"80. As noted previously, judicial rulings
such as this have led an American academic recently to describe the senior
judiciary as fulfilling the role of "judicial warriors"81, carrying on the
good fight in the court room even if not on the battlefield (though many
of them suffered the loss of their sons in France and Flanders). Indeed the
Zadig decision is a salutary reminder of how mistaken was Montesquieu's
assertion, in his De L'Esprit des Lois, of english legal perfectionism. For
according to him, "Les Anglais, pour favoriser la liberté, ont ôté toutes les
puissances intermédiaires qui formaient leur monarchie. Ils ont bien raison
de conserver cette liberté. Car s'ils venaient à la perdre, ils seraient un des
peuples les plus esclaves de la terre."
In 1929, in fact, the senior criminal judge, Lord Hewart, wrote a controversial book called The New Despotism which attacked the rise and rise of
79. Foxton, D. (2002), p. 449. See The Times, March 22, 1916, p. 5, and Fourth Report
of the Defence of the Realm (Losses) Commission, Appendix A Case 3, Claim of the
Continental tyre and rubber and Company (Great Britain) Limited of September 25, 1917.
80. See R v Halliday, ex parte Zadig [1917] AC 260 (HL).
81. Vorspan, r. (2005). p. 264.

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