This year, 1913, is the fiftieth anniversary of a very important event in the history of international law ― the adoption and enforcement by the American Government of the code of rules governing the conduct of armies in the field, which is known to the American army as General Orders No. 100, of 1863. It happens that without any intention to create a coincidence the seventh annual meeting of the American Society of International Law is appointed and we are met here, exactly fifty years after the twenty-fourth day of April, 1863, when President Lincoln promulgated that famous order. It seems appropriate for this Society at this time to celebrate the event by paying honor to Francis Lieber, the author of the instructions embodied in the order.

When Grotius was a young lawyer he served for a time as counsel for the Dutch East India Company. Out of his early labors as a corporation lawyer there grew later two wonderful books ― one the De Jure Belli et Pacis, the greatest gift that any lawyer ever gave to the world, and the other, published in 1608, the Mare Liberum. In 1868, came to light the brief which he had written in a celebrated case in which the company had captured a rich Portuguese galleon in the Straits of Malacca. It was found that one chapter of the Mare Liberum had been taken bodily from this brief. At the time the book was written, Portugal claimed dominion of the eastern and England of the northern seas. John Selden of the Inner Temple, most famous of English legal scholars, answered Grotius by a work entitled Mare Clausum; but the stars in their courses fought against Selden and today the world rejoices in the freedom of the seas.

The diplomatic protection of citizens abroad is a comparatively modern phenomenon in the evolution of the state, in constitutional and in international law. Not until the legal position of the state toward individuals, both its own citizens and aliens, and of states between themselves, had become clearly denned in modern public law, did diplomatic protection become a factor in international intercourse. A discussion of the subject therefore involves a preliminary study of three distinct legal relations, first, between the state and its own citizen; secondly, between the state and aliens resident within it; and, lastly, the relations of states among themselves with respect to their rights over and their international responsibility for delinquencies toward aliens.

There is probably no branch of the laws of war which stands in greater need of explanatory comment than do the chapters relating to prisoners of war. The generation preceding the great peace conferences at The Hague was marked by a number of important wars of which continental Europe was the theater; during these conflicts the number of persons reduced to captivity surpassed all experience, as did the number of problems which arose in connection with their safe-keeping and repatriation; but during the entire period the regulations governing their administration and detention remained substantially unchanged. It is true that several European states caused their regulations in that regard to be revised, but as those regulations were strictly internal in character and had no external operation, save in the territory of the enemy which they held in military occupation, the condition of prisoners of war remained substantially unchanged. Indeed, until the condition of this unfortunate class was made the subject of conventional regulation at The Hague, but few important ameliorations had been brought about in their status since the activity of the Emperor Napoleon was brought to a close at the battle of Waterloo.

As a result of the continual development of the northwest provinces of the Dominion of Canada, the railroad is advancing slowly closer and closer to the Hudsonian Sea. The Canadian Northern Railway aims to extend its system to Port Nelson, and the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway proposes to build a line to Fort Churchill, both suitably protected harbors on that great sea. If during a short portion of the year the breadstuffs harvested in Saskatchewan and Alberta could be transported to either or both of these points on the Hudsonian Sea, and then by steamer to Liverpool or some other European port, the length of the route between the northwest prairies of Canada and the markets of Europe would be considerably shortened.