Sensing that it might be an epilogue, as in fact it turned out to be, to his life’s work, Dr. Scott on April 1, 1939, wrote in the preface to the last of a long list of legal and scholarly volumes which bear his name as author or editor, as follows: “For nearly half a century, from the time of entering Harvard College until the present day, I have been deeply interested in the fundamental conceptions of law and of the state; and in later years it has been my good fortune to have had practical experience with the law of the state, and especially with the law of the international community.” Togive a brief account of any busy person’s life of fifty years would be difficult; to attempt to do so adequately for a man of Dr. Scott’s dynamic personality, vivid imagination, keen intellect, tireless energy, cultured mind, and human soul seems almost futile; for each of his active years one might write a separate article and not overdo the task.

The war and the present preoccupation with post-war plans have brought about a general awareness of the fact that the Americas have been a testing ground for the orderly organization of relations among sovereign states, especially in the development of cooperative principles and techniques. The construction of a political organization within which these principles and techniques could be consolidated has not, however, characterized the American experience. The Pan American Union, for example, is expressly denied the right to consider political or controversial questions, and proposals for the creation of a “league” or “association” of American states has met with courteous but definite coolness.

The international implications of the money phenomenon were to some extent perceived as early as the time of some of the scholastics who found in the universal use of money an instance of the operation of the Law of Nations (jus gentium). The latter term, it is true, was employed by the scholastics rather ambiguously, covering also rules observed by all or most nations in domestic relations. A later writer of the seventeenth century, Samuel Rachel, went further. In his Dissertations on the Laws of Nature and of Nations (1676) he advances the idea that the international circulation of many coins—he mentions especially the Turkish Ducats—proves the existence of a Law of Nations in the modern sense of a law governing the relations among independent states.

In the October, 1942, number of this JOURNAL, was published an article by one of the present authors dealing with the jurisdiction of the courts of one country over the personnel of the armed forces of another friendly country at the time on the soil of the former. The presence in so many instances, in the war now raging, of the armed forces of one power in the territory of another was mentioned as the reason for the timeliness of that article. This situation still continues and makes equally timely an examination of the rights and the practice of a host country with respect to taxation of the friendly visiting forces, their operations, supplies, and personnel.