With the adoption of a resolution by the Council of the League of Nations, transmitting the report of the Committee of Experts for the Progressive Codification of International Law to the Assembly, what may be called the preliminary work of that Committee has reached such a stage that it seems possible to review its activities in the process of codification adopted by the League of Nations. It will be remembered that the Hague Commission of Jurists in its report accompanying the Statute of the World Court recommended the creation of agencies for codification, and that Lord Robert Cecil’s opposition to codification delayed acceptance of the Commission’s recommendation until September, 1924, when the Assembly upon the initiative of Sweden provided for the appointment of a committee of experts.

The wave of exaggerated nationalism which has pervaded the nations of the earth generally since the World War has been accompanied by seemingly serious efforts on the part of national governments to arrange for the production within their territorial limits of as many as possible of the articles which their peoples consume, often quite heedless of the cost of home as compared with external production. Such disregard of economic laws could scarcely have failed to aggravate the poverty in which the world was inevitably left in the wake of the war. Political leaders have seemed wholly unmindful of the essential truth of economics, namely, that destruction and waste, the accompaniments of war, cannot be indulged in without a lowering of economic standards, that those standards can only be raised by production, and that recovery is accomplished in the measure that production is achieved at the place and by the methods which make possible the largest output of consumable goods in proportion to the labor and raw material involved.

The differences between the United States and Mexico which have been occasioned by Article XXVI I of the Mexican Constitution of 1917 and the regulatory laws designed to give it effect are concerned with such important questions of international law as to warrant a rather extended examination of the principles involved and the contentions of the two parties. This is particularly true in view of the fact that the question has been said to be one upon which there can be no difference of rational opinion, and further that it is not a justiciable one.

The Intimate Papers of Colonel House1 is one of the most interesting collections of memoirs that has appeared in the post-war period. The contacts of Colonel House, as personal representative of President Wilson, with diplomats and statesmen in the stirring years of the war was probably broader than that of almost any other person, and certainly broader than that of any other American. His papers are so full of interesting comment on men and events that they furnish source material for many essays on different aspects of the times. The purpose of this article is merely to sketch Colonel House’s connection with the main international events of the Wilson Administration up to the entrance of the United States into the war. For some reason, his narrative ends with the period of American neutrality and the entrance of the United States into the war. Colonel House’s activities in connection with the war program of the United States and the Peace Conference at Paris are not related, and the world must hold its patience for a third volume on this critical period.

The scientific organizations which flourished before the World War have had great difficulty in continuing their labors after its termination. The Institute of International Law has been no exception. It was to have met in Munich in September, 1914, and its program had been completely arranged; but the war which started in August, 1914, necessarily put an end to all arrangements for the session. A resort to arms inevitably brings with it a desire for its avoidance; and the greater the war, the greater the desire. A decade, a generation struggles in the mists and shadows, seeking to extricate itself from the post-war spirit, condemning the past somewhat indiscriminately and advocating innovations which, new in expression, are nevertheless the aspirations of those who, in all time, crushed and bruised by force, seek to replace it by justice.