International law — to use Bentham's innovation of 1789, which has found favor with the public, instead of the older, more expressive term, law of nations—has been variously denounced and praised as international morality or ethics; international courtesy or convention in the social sense of the word; comity as distinguished from rule of law; or merely and finally as the foreign policy, such as the Monroe Doctrine, which at a particular time happens to catch the fancy of nations. If admitted as law in general or as possessing some of the elements of ordinary municipal law, the principle that pinches is declared not to be law and to have no binding force whatever, because there is no supreme court of nations in which the dispute may be litigated and no sheriff to execute the decree, supposing that one had actually been delivered. But the judgment of a municipal court is not self-executing, as, for instance, when President Jackson stamped his foot, saying: “John Marshall has made the decision; now let him execute it!” The executive officer of the court, the sheriff or marshal, did not enforce it, and that, forsooth, changed the nature of the transaction! Suppose the sheriff meets resistance in performing the mandate of the court, the armed force of the nation may be called upon and in final result the nation is in the field.

The first Congress of the Revolution assembled in Carpenter's Hall, Philadelphia, September 5, 1774. An address to the king of England was adopted and transmitted to the agents of several of the colonies in London, with instructions to present it to the king. They were to ask the aid of such Englishmen as they might have reason to believe were “friends to American Liberty.” The instructions were drafted October 26, 1774, by John Jay and Richard Henry Lee, and were sent to Paul Wentworth, who represented New Hampshire, Charles Garth, a member of Parliament, the agent of South Carolina; William Bollan, agent of the Massachusetts Council; Thomas Life, the agent of Connecticut; Edmund Burke, who had been chosen agent of New York in 1771; Arthur Lee, who held an appointment to succeed Benjamin Franklin as agent of the Massachusetts Assembly; and Franklin himself, who had been appointed in 1765 agent of Pennsylvania, in 1768 of Georiga, in the same year of New Jersey, and in 1770 of the Massachusetts Assembly.

The consular service of the United States has been for a long time the object of a great deal of criticism, some of which unfortunately has been well founded but much has been due to imperfect acquaintance with the legitimate functions of consuls and, therefore, to lack of ability to judge accurately of their shortcomings. It is of interest to note that of recent years the criticism has been for the most part confined to our own country, while from the people of other nations our consuls have received unstinted praise for their activity and efficiency, and our system has been frequently held up abroad as a model after which to reorganize some of the older European systems the virtues of which it has been the custom of our people to extol. But while it is true that in many respects our consuls have shown themselves the equals if not the superiors of the consuls of other nations, the fact remains that our service has been uneven in point of efficiency; there has been no satisfactory organization; little care has been exercised in the selection of persons for appointment; and the salaries and equipment have been far from adequate. Repeated attempts to correct these defects have been made during a period dating almost from the beginning of the government, but, with the exception of the improvements made in 1856, all these attempts have failed largely because they lacked the support of any considerable public sentiment.

The recent report on Citizenship of the United States, Expatriation, and Protection Abroad, together with the work of Mr. Van Dyne on Citizenship of the United States, and the invaluable Digest of International Law, by Prof. John Bassett Moore, render easily accessible and readily comprehensible the principles of the American law with reference to the status of our citizens and of aliens for the time being within our territorial limits. At the same time, however, these publications make more evident the fact that, in many instances, the conflicting claims of two or more states upon the same individual are settled rather by mutual concessions than upon principle; that legal and political rights are asserted, but with an understanding, more or less explicit, that under given circumstances they will not be exercised. Thus, by a legislative act, legally binding upon our executive and judicial officers, we have declared the right of the individual to expatriate himself to be an absolute and indefeasible one, and that the naturalized American citizen is to have the same rights and is to receive the same protection as the native-born citizen, whether or not the state of original allegiance consents to the expatriation thus involved. In practice, this law, thus formally declared, has never been rigidly enforced, for the very good reason that to attempt to do so would lead to constant and serious international difficulties.

This subject is a timely one from the fact that we are on the eve of the meeting of the second international conference at The Hague, the first conference in 1899 having voted that —

The conference expresses the wish that the proposal which contemplates the declaration of the inviolability of private property in naval warfare may be referred to a subsequent conference for consideration.

The present programme for this coming conference includes this question of the immunity of private property as one agreed upon for discussion.

Before entering into a discussion of the subject, it may be well to make a résumé of the historical status of the question up to the present time so far as the United States, Great Britain, and other civilized countries are concerned.