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PART II - HAGUE RULES 371Article 4 (2) - The catalogue of exceptionsfection de marques;p) de vices cachés échappant àune diligence raisonnable;q) de toute autre cause ne provenantpas du fait ou de la faute dutransporteur ou du fait ou de la fautedes agents ou préposés du transporteur,mais le fardeau de la preuveincombera à la personne réclamantle bénéfice de cette exceptionet il lui appartiendra de montrerque ni la faute personnelle ni le faitdu transporteur ni la faute ou le faitdes agents ou préposés du transporteurn’ont contribué à la perteou au dommage.proof shall be on the person claimingthe benefit of this exception toshow that neither the actual fault orprivity of the carrier nor the fault orneglect of the agents or servants ofthe carrier contributed to the lossor damage.1. The Catalogue of ExceptionsILA 1921 Hague ConferenceSecond day’s proceedings - 31 August 1921[143]Mr. Leopold Dor: The alteration I want to make is not specially on (a), but on allthe amendments proposed by the shipowners for all that clause No. 2. I think it wouldbe very unwise to make our rules look like a bill of lading. Especially as far as the Conferenceis concerned, if we go to the Chambers of Commerce (and I speak especiallyin view of the French Chambers of Commerce) and we say to them “All the interestsconcerned have met at the Conference of the Hague and have discussed this questionand agreed upon those rules”; they will look at those rules and the first thing that willstrike them is that they are much too long. You have in England a way of defining rulesand legislation which is very different from ours. We try to make things as short as wecan, and I fancy that you try to make them as long as you can (Laughter); but you certainlymake them much longer than we do. The Marine Insurance Act, on that smallpoint, is longer than our whole Civil Code, which covers the whole of French civil law.You like long enumerations. We like very short sentences in which there is embodieda principle which covers everything. You are always afraid of forgetting one thing orthe other. We say the right way not to forget is not to enumerate. If you start making along enumeration then you are sure to forget something. It seems to me that that iswhat we are doing in that long enumeration. Besides, not only the French cargo owners,but the French Chambers of Commerce, will say: “Oh, well, those shrewd Englishshipowners have managed to convince the International Law Association to put oneof their bills of lading into the Hague Rules 1921, and they will now say no longer billsof lading, but ‘Here are the Hague Rules, 1921’”. You want to avoid that. That Article,before the amendments or without the amendments, is already quite long enough.