A recent decision handed down by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, and reported in its last published report, involves the broad consideration of the status of sovereigns as defendants both from the point of view of international and of municipal law. The decision concretely confirms the opinion that no matter from what point of view the theory of international law may be said to proceed, its doctrines are based on as firm principles of sound reasoning and justice as are the doctrines of the ordinary municipal law. And this notwithstanding the popular impression prevalent, especially among laymen, that international comity is the dominant principle of international law.

When the entire course of a river passes through the territory of but a single state, it is generally agreed that a right of exclusive control is possessed by the territorial sovereign which may, therefore, bar the navigation of the stream by foreign nations. Any privileges of transit enjoyed by their vessels are always understood to be subject to the consent of the local state. Thus, with respect to such rivers as the Mississippi and the Hudson, foreign countries enjoy no right of navigation.

Perhaps the most important of the occasional duties of the Department of State is that which involves its agency in recording the result of the quadrennial elections held in the several States for the office of President and Vice-President of the United States. Section 1 of Article II of the Constitution provided that the electors should meet in the several States, and, having voted for a President and Vice-President, should make a list of the persons voted for, which they must sign and certify to and transmit sealed to the seat of government directed to the President of the Senate.

President Monroe in his famous message to Congress, December 2, 1823, aimed both at the attempts at colonization which Europe might be led to make upon American soil, and the efforts which Spain might make to place its emancipated colonies again under her yoke. Europe saw with displeasure that the watch-word "America for the Americans," by which phrase they briefly and incompletely condensed the purport of the message, had a double significance, political above all for the United States, but one almost exclusively economic for the countries of Latin-America, which adopted it with enthusiasm.

The Chinese nationality law recently passed is of considerable interest as illustrating the tendency of China to fall in line with modern countries in respect to law-making, and her attempt to remedy by her independent legislation a phase of the anomalous situation growing out of her seventy years' intercourse with the outer world. The law aims at two points, (1) to define the status of nationality and (2) to minimize the abuse of the lax naturalization laws of some foreign countries as applied in their colonies near China.