The Arbitral Tribunal of the Permanent Court at The Hague, by its award of the 7th of last September, in the case of the North Atlantic Coast Fisheries, brought to a close a controversy which in its various phases has been an almost constant source of vexatious dispute between the United States and Great Britain for the past seventy years.

A treaty, granting exceptional rights, such as that which this Tribunal was called upon to consider, is peculiarly susceptible to different interpretations as the course of time brings new conditions not contemplated by its negotiators. The relations of the parties are changed. A liberty which at the date of the treaty was considered indispensable may become worthless, while one which was deemed insignificant may in years assume a place of vital importance to the beneficiaries under the grant. This change of conditions and of the value of rights has been especially true of the liberties acquired by the United States for its inhabitants under the first article of the Treaty of October 20, 1818.

On the 9th of April, 1911, the Hague court will celebrate its first decennial. The first decade of the court was opened by the submission on the part of the United States and Mexico of the Pious Fund case to the tribunal for its decision, and of the eight cases so far submitted to the court and brought to trial during the first decade, the United States has been a party in four, and in a fifth, the Japanese House Tax case, the United States agreed to abide by the result. The last case to be tried was the Orinoco Steamship Company case submitted by the United States and Venezuela.

Both the Pious Fund and the Orinoco Steamship Company case raised important questions vitally affecting the future of international arbitration. Both cases were peculiar in that they dealt with a question which had already been once before decided by an arbitral tribunal. In both cases the effect of the previous arbitral decision was submitted as a preliminary question to the Hague court. In the Pious Fund case the preliminary question submitted was as to whether the claim, as a consequence of the former decision of Sir Edward Thornton, umpire under the convention between the United States and Mexico of 1868, was within the principle of res judicata. The court sustained the contention of the United States, by holding that the rule of res judicata applies to international arbitral sentences “ rendered within the limits of the jurisdiction fixed by the compromise,” and accordingly rendered judgment in favor of the United States, without considering the merits of the claim.

International law, perhaps more than any other branch of the science, is progressive. In its study, the elements of this progress should be traced to their origin. International law has been a growth of mutual understanding between nations, developed out of necessities of particular situations, ripening gradually from precedent to precedent and finally formulated and codified in international conventions and treaties. Of these the most notable are the conventions adopted at the two conferences held at The Hague in 1899 and 1907.

It is not surprising to find that times of war have given rise to many of the rules which nations have gradually come to recognize and embodied in the system which has become common to them all. In times of peace the situation adapts itself more readily to the requirements of each nation. War necessarily displaces the ordinary course of business and human conduct.

As a characteristic of contemporary civilization, history will doubtless point to the unceasing effort to establish on a solid basis the juridical organization of the world. The essential requisites are already at hand. Facility of communication, suppression of distances, the fact that the different regions are in constant communication, all of these things greatly facilitate the work. There are no longer undiscovered lands, or inaccessible countries. In the commercial and industrial world business organizations embrace all the nations of the earth. In the intellectual domain, an irresistible international movement has succeeded the narrow conceptions heretofore existing. It is especially in the domain of law that such manifestations have been shown and are still shown with an ever-increasing intensity. In the vast subject of the conflict of laws, an effort is being made to obtain uniform rules; in the subject of the law of nations not only have numerous conventions been concluded, some of which number as contracting parties practically all the states; but the application of justice has been organized, and, already, has gone beyond the phase of arbitration; there exists a true judicial court, a court which declares and decides law in its own right instead of depending upon the will of those amenable to its jurisdiction. Everything indicates that the time is close at hand when a legislative and an executive power will be established over the nations; at any rate, no one nowadays thinks of pronouncing such institutions impossible and fit to be classed with unrealizable dreams.

In his first annual message, December 8, 1829, President Andrew Jackson said :

Eastern Europe is at the present moment in such a condition of unstable equilibrium and fermentation that it can not be known whether this abnormal state of affairs can end in peace or in war. The map of the East, so carefully prepared by the Congress of Berlin in 1878, is hardly more than a memory. The state of conventional law which resulted, having been decreed in an arbitrary manner, could only be artificial; and being sustained solely by the balancing of the forces of the Eastern States, it had to be modified according to circumstances, thus furnishing a new illustration of the importance of the harsh rule of interpretation of treaties known as the clause “ rebus sic stantibus.” The sudden happenings of 1908 have for their remote but certain cause the war in Manchuria, that grave political blunder of St. Petersburg. Held in check upon the Bosphorus by England, supplanted little by little at Constantinople by German influence, Russia, modifying the line of policy which she had constantly followed since the testament, spurious or genuine, but undoubtedly realistic of Peter the Great, thought to find in the extreme East an outlet for her political and territorial ambitions. There she disclosed her own military weakness rather than the strength of her adversary, and suffered the annihilation of her political influence in Europe. Even the Western balance of power was affected. France lost Morocco; and as for the Eastern balance of power, it no longer exists, and the kingdom of Servia has lost the reason for its existence. It is through the sudden displacement of the two sides of the scales into which Russia and Austria had thrown the weight of their swords that the Eastern upheaval was created.

It is proposed that the Fifth Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law be held at Washington, as usual, in the New Willard Hotel, on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, April 27–29, 1911, and the tentative programme prepared by the Committee on Programme continues the work of the Society in the matter of the codification of the international law of peace, and further takes up the question of aliens versus natives, as distinct from the protection accorded to aliens by the home governments, the topic of discussion at the last annual meeting.

First, as to the codification of international law. The Third Annual Meeting appointed a committee to consider the question of the codification of international law, which committee presented to the Society at its last meeting a preliminary report in two parts, the first of which dealt with the scope and plan of codification and the second outlined the history and status of codification in general. For the text of the reports and the proposed classification and treatment of international law for the purposes of codification see Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Meeting, pages 197–227. The report was received and placed on file and the committee instructed to continue its work. Therefore, the matter of codification may be regarded as unfinished business and as such will be considered by the Society at,the session of Saturday morning, April 29th.