[1] Several altars of this type have been preserved.
HIGH SEAS, an expression in international law meaning all those parts of
the sea not under the sovereignty of adjacent states. Claims have at
times been made to exclusive dominion over large areas of the sea as
well as over wide margins, such as a 100 m., 60 m., range of vision,
&c., from land. The action and reaction of the interests of navigation,
however, have brought states to adopt a limitation first enunciated by
Bynkershoek in the formula "terrae dominium finitur ubi finitur armorum
vis." Thenceforward cannon-shot range became the determining factor in
the fixation of the margin of sea afterwards known as "territorial
waters" (q.v.). With the exception of these territorial waters, bays of
certain dimensions and inland waters surrounded by territory of the same
state, and serving only as a means of access to ports of the state by
whose territory they are surrounded, and some waters allowed by
immemorial usage to rank as territorial, all seas and oceans form part
of the high sea. The usage of the high sea is free to all the nations of
the world, subject only to such restrictions as result from respect for
the equal rights of others, and to those which nations may contract with
each other to observe. An interesting case affecting land-locked seas
was that of the _Emperor of Japan_ v. _The Peninsular and Oriental Steam
Navigation Company_, in which a collision had taken place in the inland
sea of Japan. The British Supreme Court at Shanghai declared this sea to
form part of the high sea. On appeal to the privy council, the
appellants were successful. Though the decision of the Shanghai court on
the point in question was not dealt with by the privy council, Japan
continues to treat her inland sea as under her exclusive jurisdiction.
(T. Ba.)
HIGHWAY, a public road over which all persons have full right of
way--walking, riding or driving. Such roads in England for the most part
either are of immemorial antiquity or have been created under the
authority of an act of parliament. But a private owner may create a
highway at common law by dedicating the soil to the use of the public
for that purpose; and the using of a road for a number of years, without
interruption, will support the presumption that the soil has been so
dedicated. At common law the parish is required to maintain all highways
within its bounds; but by special custom the obligation may attach to a
particular township or district, and in certain cases the owner of land
is bound by the conditions of his holding to keep a highway in repair.
Breach of the obligation is treated as a criminal offence, and is
prosecuted by indictment. Bridges, on the other hand, and so much of the
highway as is immediately connected with them, are as a general rule a
charge on the county; and by 22 Henry VIII. c. 5 the obligation of the
county is extended to 300 yds. of the highway on either side of the
bridge. A bridge, like a highway, may be a burden on neighbouring land
_ratione tenurae_. Private owners so burdened may sometimes claim a
special toll from passengers, called a "toll traverse."
Extensive changes in the English law of highways have been made by
various highway acts, viz. the Highway Act 1835, and amending acts of
1862, 1864, 1878 and 1891. The leading principle of the Highway Act 1835
is to place the highways under the direction of parish surveyors, and to
provide for the necessary expenses by a rate levied on the occupiers of
land. It is the duty of the surveyor to keep the highways in repair; and
if a highway is out of repair, the surveyor may be summoned before
justices and convicted in a penalty not exceeding L5, and ordered to
complete the repairs within a limited time. The surveyor is likewise
specially charged with the removal of nuisances on the highway. A
highway nuisance may be abated by any person, and may be made the
subject of indictment at common law. The amending acts, while not
interfering with the operation of the principal act, authorize the
creation of highway districts on a larger scale. The justices of a
county may convert it or any portion of it into a highway district to be
governed by a highway board, the powers and responsibilities of which
will be the same as those of the parish surveyor under the former act.
The board consists of representatives of the various parishes, called
"way wardens" together with the justices for the county residing within
the district. Salaries and similar expenses incurred by the board are
charged on a district fund to which the several parishes contribute; but
each parish remains separately responsible for the expenses of
maintaining its own highways. By the Local Government Act 1888 the
entire maintenance of main roads was thrown upon county councils. The
Public Health Act 1875 vested the powers and duties of surveyors of
highways and vestries in urban authorities, while the Local Government
Act 1894 transferred to the district councils of every rural district
all the powers of rural sanitary authorities and highway authorities
(see ENGLAND: _Local Government_).
The Highway Act of 1835 specified as offences for which the driver of a
carriage on the public highway might be punished by a fine, in addition
to any civil action that might be brought against him--riding upon the
cart, or upon any horse drawing it, and not having some other person to
guide it, unless there be some person driving it; negligence causing
damage to person or goods being conveyed on the highway; quitting his
cart, or leaving control of the horses, or leaving the cart so as to be
an obstruction on the highway; not having the owner's name painted up;
refusing to give the same; and not keeping on the left or near side of
the road, when meeting any other carriage or horse. This rule does not
apply in the case of a carriage meeting a foot-passenger, but a driver
is bound to use due care to avoid driving against any person crossing
the highway on foot. At the same time a passenger crossing the highway
is also bound to use due care in avoiding vehicles, and the mere fact of
a driver being on the wrong side of the road would not be evidence of
negligence in such a case.
The "rule of the road" given above is peculiar to the United Kingdom.
Cooley's treatise on the _American Law of Torts_ states that "the custom
of the country, in some states enacted into statute law, requires that
when teams approach and are about to pass on the highway, each shall
keep to the right of the centre of the travelled portion of the road."
This also appears to be the general rule on the continent of Europe.
By the Lights on Vehicles Act 1907, all vehicles on highways in England
and Wales must display to the front a white light during the period
between one hour after sunset and one hour before sunrise. Locomotives
and motor cars, being dealt with by special acts, are excluded from the
operation of the act, as are bicycles and tricycles (dealt with by the
Local Government Act 1888), and vehicles drawn or propelled by hand, but
every machine or implement drawn by animals comes within the act. There
are two exceptions: (1) vehicles carrying inflammable goods in the
neighbourhood of places where inflammable goods are stored, and (2)
vehicles engaged in harvesting. The public have a right to pass along a
highway freely, safely and conveniently, and any wrongful act or
omission which prevents them doing so is a nuisance, for the prevention
and abatement of which the highways and other acts contain provisions.
Generally, nuisance to highway may be caused by encroachment, by
interfering with the soil of the highway, by attracting crowds, by
creating danger or inconvenience on or near the highway, by placing
obstacles on the highway, by unreasonable user, by offences against
decency and good order, &c.
The use of locomotives, motor cars and other vehicles on highways is
regulated by acts of 1861-1903.
Formerly under the Turnpike Acts many of the more important highways
were placed under the management of boards of commissioners or trustees.
The trustees were required and empowered to maintain, repair and improve
the roads committed to their charge, and the expenses of the trust were
met by tolls levied on persons using the road. The various grounds of
exemption from toll on turnpike roads were all of a public character,
e.g. horses and carriages attending the sovereign or royal family, or
used by soldiers or volunteers in uniform, were free from toll. In
general horses and carriages used in agricultural work were free from
toll. By the Highways and Locomotives Act of 1878 disturnpiked roads
became "main roads." Ordinary highways might be declared to be "main
roads," and "main roads" be reduced to the status of ordinary highways.
In Scotland the highway system is regulated by the Roads and Bridges Act
1878 and amending acts. The management and maintenance of the highways
and bridges is vested in county road trustees, viz. the commissioners of
supply, certain elected trustees representing ratepayers in parishes and
others. One of the consequences of the act was the abolition of tolls,
statute-labour, causeway mail and other exactions for the maintenance of
bridges and highways, and all turnpike roads became highways, and all
highways became open to the public free of tolls and other exactions.
The county is divided into districts under district committees, and
county and district officers are appointed. The expenses of highway
management in each district (or parish), together with a proportion of
the general expenses of the act, are levied by the trustees by an
assessment on the lands and heritages within the district (or parish).
Highway, in the law of the states of the American Union, generally means
a lawful public road, over which all citizens are allowed to pass and
repass on foot, on horseback, in carriages and waggons. Sometimes it is
held to be restricted to county roads as opposed to town-ways. In
statutes dealing with offences connected with the highway, such as
gaming, negligence of carriers, &c., "highway" includes navigable
rivers. But in a statute punishing with death robbery on the highway,
railways were held not to be included in the term. In one case it has
been held that any way is a highway which has been used as such for
fifty years.
See Glen, _Law Relating to Highways_; Pratt, _Law of Highways, Main
Roads and Bridges_.
HIGINBOTHAM, GEORGE (1827-1893), chief-justice of Victoria, Australia,
sixth son of T. Higinbotham of Dublin, was born on the 19th of April
1827, and educated at the Royal School, Dungannon, and at Trinity
College, Dublin. After entering as a law student at Lincoln's Inn, and
being engaged as reporter on the _Morning Chronicle_ in 1849, he
emigrated to Victoria, where he contributed to the _Melbourne Herald_
and practised at the bar (having been "called" in 1853) with much
success. In 1850 he became editor of the _Melbourne Argus_, but resigned
in 1859 and returned to the bar. He was elected to the legislative
assembly in 1861 for Brighton as an independent Liberal, was rejected at
the general election of the same year, but was returned nine months
later. In 1863 he became attorney-general. Under his influence measures
were passed through the legislative assembly of a somewhat extreme
character, completely ignoring the rights of the legislative council,
and the government was carried on without any Appropriation Act for more
than a year. Mr Higinbotham, by his eloquence and earnestness, obtained
great influence amongst the members of the legislative assembly, but his
colleagues were not prepared to follow him as far as he desired to go.
He contended that in a constitutional colony like Victoria the secretary
of state for the colonies had no right to fetter the discretion of the
queen's representative. Mr Higinbotham did not return to power with his
chief, Sir James M'Culloch, after the defeat of the short-lived Sladen
administration; and being defeated for Brighton at the next general
election by a comparatively unknown man, he devoted himself to his
practice at the bar. Amongst his other labours as attorney-general he
had codified all the statutes which were in force throughout the colony.
In 1874 he was returned to the legislative assembly for Brunswick, but
after a few months he resigned his seat. In 1880 he was appointed a
puisne judge of the supreme court, and in 1886, on the retirement of Sir
William Stawell, he was promoted to the office of chief justice. Mr
Higinbotham was appointed president of the International Exhibition held
at Melbourne in 1888-1889, but did not take any active part in its
management. One of his latest public acts was to subscribe a sum of L10,
10s. a week towards the funds of the strikers in the great Australian
labour dispute of 1890, an act which did not meet with general approval.
He died in 1893.
HILARION, ST (c. 290-371), abbot, the first to introduce the monastic
system into Palestine. The chief source of information is a life written
by St Jerome; it was based upon a letter, no longer extant, written by
St Epiphanius, who had known Hilarion. The accounts in Sozomen are
mainly based on Jerome's _Vita_; but Otto Zocker has shown that Sozomen
also had at his disposal authentic local traditions (see "Hilarion von
Gaza" in the _Neue Jahrbucher fur deutsche Theologie_, 1894), the most
important study on Hilarion, which is written against the hypercritical
school of Weingarten and shows that Hilarion must be accepted as an
historical personage and the _Vita_ as a substantially correct account
of his career. He was born of heathen parents at Tabatha near Gaza about
290; he was sent to Alexandria for his education and there became a
convert to Christianity; about 306 he visited St Anthony and became his
disciple, embracing the eremitical life. He returned to his native place
and for many years lived as a hermit in the desert by the marshes on the
Egyptian border. Many disciples put themselves under his guidance; but
his influence must have been limited to south Palestine, for there is no
mention of him in Palladius or Cassian. In 356 he left Palestine and
went again to Egypt; but the accounts given in the _Vita_ of his travels
during the last fifteen years of his life must be taken with extreme
caution. It is there said that he went from Egypt to Sicily, and thence
to Epidaurus, and finally to Cyprus where he met Epiphanius and died in
371.
An abridged story of his life will be found in Alban Butler's _Lives
of the Saints_, on the 21st of October, and a critical sketch with
full references in Herzog-Hauck, _Realencyklopadie_ (ed. 3).
(E. C. B.)
HILARIUS (HILARY[1]), ST (c. 300-367), bishop of Pictavium (Poitiers),
an eminent "doctor" of the Western Church, sometimes referred to as the
"malleus Arianorum" and the "Athanasius of the West," was born at
Poitiers about the end of the 3rd century A.D. His parents were pagans
of distinction. He received a good education, including what had even
then become somewhat rare in the West, some knowledge of Greek. He
studied, later on, the Old and New Testament writings, with the result
that he abandoned his neo-platonism for Christianity, and with his wife
and his daughter received the sacrament of baptism. So great was the
respect in which he was held by the citizens of Poitiers that about 353,
although still a married man, he was unanimously elected bishop. At that
time Arianism was threatening to overrun the Western Church; to repel
the irruption was the great task which Hilary undertook. One of his
first steps was to secure the excommunication, by those of the Gallican
hierarchy who still remained orthodox, of Saturninus, the Arian bishop
of Arles and of Ursacius and Valens, two of his prominent supporters.
About the same time he wrote to the emperor Constantius a remonstrance
against the persecutions by which the Arians had sought to crush their
opponents (_Ad Constantium Augustum liber primus_, of which the most
probable date is 355). His efforts were not at first successful, for at
the synod of Biterrae (Beziers), summoned in 356 by Constantius with
the professed purpose of settling the longstanding disputes, Hilary was
by an imperial rescript banished with Rhodanus of Toulouse to Phrygia,
in which exile he spent nearly four years. Thence, however, he continued
to govern his diocese; while he found leisure for the preparation of two
of the most important of his contributions to dogmatic and polemical
theology, the _De synodis_ or _De fide Orientalium_, an epistle
addressed in 358 to the Semi-Arian bishops in Gaul, Germany and Britain,
expounding the true views (sometimes veiled in ambiguous words) of the
Oriental bishops on the Nicene controversy, and the _De trinitate libri
xii._,[2] composed in 359 and 360, in which, for the first time, a
successful attempt was made to express in Latin the theological
subtleties elaborated in the original Greek. The former of these works
was not entirely approved by some members of his own party, who thought
he had shown too great forbearance towards the Arians; to their
criticisms he replied in the _Apologetica ad reprehensores libri de
synodis responsa_. In 359 Hilary attended the convocation of bishops at
Seleucia In Isauria, where, with the Egyptian Athanasians, he joined the
Homoiousian majority against the Arianizing party headed by Acacius of
Caesarea; thence he went to Constantinople, and, in a petition (_Ad
Constantium Augustum liber secundus_) personally presented to the
emperor in 360, repudiated the calumnies of his enemies and sought to
vindicate his trinitarian principles. His urgent and repeated request
for a public discussion with his opponents, especially with Ursacius and
Valens, proved at last so inconvenient that he was sent back to his
diocese, which he appears to have reached about 361, within a very short
time of the accession of Julian. He was occupied for two or three years
in combating Arianism within his diocese; but in 364, extending his
efforts once more beyond Gaul, he impeached Auxentius, bishop of Milan,
and a man high in the imperial favour, as heterodox. Summoned to appear
before the emperor (Valentinian) at Milan and there maintain his
charges, Hilary had the mortification of hearing the supposed heretic
give satisfactory answers to all the questions proposed; nor did his
(doubtless sincere) denunciation of the metropolitan as a hypocrite save
himself from an ignominious expulsion from Milan. In 365 he published
the _Contra Arianos vel Auxentium Mediolanensem liber_, in connexion
with the controversy; and also (but perhaps at a somewhat earlier date)
the _Contra Constantium Augustum liber_, in which he pronounced that
lately deceased emperor to have been Antichrist, a rebel against God, "a
tyrant whose sole object had been to make a gift to the devil of that
world for which Christ had suffered." Hilary is sometimes regarded as
the first Latin Christian hymn-writer, but none of the compositions
assigned to him is indisputable. The later years of his life were spent
in comparative quiet, devoted in part to the preparation of his
expositions of the Psalms (_Tractatus super Psalmos_), for which he was
largely indebted to Origen; of his _Commentarius in Evangelium
Matthaei_, a work on allegorical lines of no exegetical value; and of
his no longer extant translation of Origen's commentary on Job. While he
thus closely followed the two great Alexandrians, Origen and Athanasius,
in exegesis and Christology respectively, his work shows many traces of
vigorous independent thought. He died in 367; no more exact date is
trustworthy. He holds the highest rank among the Latin writers of his
century. Designated already by Augustine as "the illustrious doctor of
the churches," he by his works exerted an increasing influence in later
centuries; and by Pius IX. he was formally recognized as "universae
ecclesiae doctor" at the synod of Bordeaux in 1851. Hilary's day in the
Roman calendar is the 13th of January.[3]
EDITIONS.--Erasmus (Basel, 1523, 1526, 1528); P. Coustant
(Benedictine, Paris, 1693); Migne (_Patrol. Lat._ ix., x.). The
_Tractatus de mysteriis_, ed. J. F. Gamurrini (Rome, 1887), and the
_Tractatus super Psalmos_, ed. A. Zingerle in the Vienna _Corpus
scrip. eccl. Lat._ xxii. Translation by E. W. Watson in _Nicene and
Post-Nicene Fathers_, ix.
LITERATURE.--The life by (Venantius) Fortunatus c. 550 is almost
worthless. More trustworthy are the notices in Jerome (_De vir.
illus._ 100), Sulpicius Severus (_Chron._ ii. 39-45) and in Hilary's
own writings. H. Reinkens, _Hilarius von Poictiers_ (1864); O.
Bardenhewer, _Patrologie_; A. Harnack, _Hist. of Dogma_, esp. vol.
iv.; F. Loofs, in Herzog-Hauck's _Realencyk._ viii.