Its twenty-second year was a lean year for the Permanent Court of International Justice. No meeting was held by the Court, no case was referred to it, and no prospect appeared for an early resumption of its activities.

This evening I am asking you to consider with me for a while the subject of international boundaries, which, by a process involving many forces, has come to have a very important position in international law. Ratzel, the great German authority in the field of political geography, said that “the mathematical precision of boundaries is a special characteristic of higher civilization; the progress of geodesy and cartography have permitted the making in Europe of political boundaries as well as geographical abstractions.” I employ the term “boundary” rather than the term “frontier,” for “frontier” is used in two senses: one, that of the boundary; the other, that of the zone, narrower or wider, where one state ends and another begins, in which sometimes the exact limit of that frontier has never been exactly fixed.

There is no doubt but that the President can, with the consent of two-thirds of the Senate, make treaties binding the United States and compelling the House of Representatives, under penalty of sacrificing the good faith of the United States, to make such appropriations or to pass or to refrain from passing such laws as may be necessary to carry them out. The House has objected to being thus coerced on several occasions, but constitutional lawyers have not questioned the power of the President and Senate to act.

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.

During the course of some thirteen years, from the Fifth International Conference of American States at Santiago in 1923 to the Conference for the Maintenance of Peace at Buenos Aires in 1936, the American Republics adopted a wide variety of treaties and conventions dealing with the pacific settlement of disputes arising between them. These agreements cover all of the generally accepted procedures, except that of judicial settlement in the sense of submission to a permanent court as distinct from an arbitral tribunal. Each of the separate procedures appears to have been adopted without any plan of coordinating it with other procedures, with the result that there is duplication and overlapping of provisions and occasionally open contradiction. There is no logical progression of obligations so that a dispute could, at the initiative of a plaintiff State, go forward from one procedure to another until final settlement.

An editorial on the Turkish Institute of International Law by Professor Philip Marshall Brown, President of the American Peace Society, appeared in the October 1943 issue of this JOURNAL. I had the pleasure of publishing in the ULUS newspaper on the 23rd of February, 1944, a translation of this editorial, which contained the expression of many good wishes for our Institute no less than for Turkey itself and I was rewarded by seeing that it aroused great interest and profound gratification in learned and political circles in Turkey. Needless to say, this favorable comment on its inauguration and work, written by an authority in the most progressive country in the world, was recorded with deep gratitude and pride by our Institute.

September 28, 1939, marked the conclusion of the Soviet-German agreement on the delimitation, in line with “mutual state interests,” of the conquered Polish territories.

The twenty-sixth session of the International Labor Conference—one of the more important in its history—was held at Philadelphia between April 20 and May 12, 1944. Forty-one countries were represented by official delegations and three by observers, making a total of forty-four countries represented. Twenty-eight delegations were fully tripartite while twentythree contained cabinet ministers and members of legislative bodies. If the size of the session was a noteworthy indication of interest in its agenda, the delegates’ national rank and experience—political and technical—was hardly less so.

The current war has been marked by a drastic extension of the practice of taking hostages. Ever since antiquity such action has constituted a permissible expedient, as frequent in peacetime as during war. Only recently, however, has it become a major weapon of warfare. The contemporary experience of total war necessitates a revaluation of the law and practice in regard to hostages. German actions in this war have involved such marked disregard of international law as to bring into question the entire legal foundation of the taking of hostages.