In opening this meeting of the American Society of International Law, which I hope will be the first of many meetings in unbroken succession to continue long after we personally have ceased to take part in affairs, let me welcome you to the beginning of your labors for a more thorough understanding of this important and fascinating subject. It is impossible that the human mind should be addressed to questions better worth its noblest efforts, offering a greater opportunity for usefulness in the exercise of its powers, or more full of historical and contemporary interest, than in the field of international rights and duties. The change in the theory and practice of government which has marked the century since the establishment of the American Union has shifted the determination of great questions of domestic national policy from a few rulers in each country to the great body of the people, who render the ultimate decision under all modern constitutional governments. Coincident with that change the practice of diplomacy has ceased to be a mystery confined to a few learned men who strive to give effect to the wishes of personal rulers, and has become a representative function answering to the opinions and the will of the multitude of citizens, who themselves create the relations between states and determine the issues of friendship and estrangement, of peace and war. Under the new system there are many dangers from which the old system was free. The rules and customs which the experience of centuries had shown to be essential to the maintenance of peace and good understanding between nations have little weight with the new popular masters of diplomacy; the precedents and agreements of opinion which have carried so great a part of the rights and duties of nations toward each other beyond the pale of discussion are but little understood. The education of public opinion, which should lead the sovereign people in each country to understand the definite limitations upon national rights and the full scope and responsibility of national duties, has only just begun. Information, understanding, leadership of opinion in these matters, so vital to wise judgment and right action in international affairs, are much needed. This society may serve as a collegium, in the true sense of the word, in which all who choose to seek a broader knowledge of the law that governs the affairs of nations may give each to the other the incitement of earnest and faithful study and may give to the great body of our countrymen a clearer view of their international rights and responsibilities.

On February 15, 1905, the president of the United States transmitted to the senate, with an accompanying message, the protocol of an agreement, signed eleven days earlier, between the United States and the Dominican Republic, providing for the collection and disbursement by the United States of the customs revenues of the Dominican Republic. On February 25, 1907, a little more than two years later, the senate ratified an independent convention between the United States and the Dominican Republic, signed at Santo Domingo City by the plenipotentiaries on the 8th inst. preceding, providing for the assistance of the United States in the collection and application of the customs revenues of the Dominican Republic. At this time of writing the new convention awaits only the approval of the Dominican congress to become operative.

In Part First of these notes the nature of sovereignty was discussed and its manifestations in a single state and a federal state considered. It is now proposed to carry the investigation further, and to see the effect of viewing sovereignty from standpoints internal and external to the state. Having completed this examination, the subjects of independence, civil liberty, state liberty, constitutions, and law in their relation to sovereignty will be briefly treated.

Through the Hague convention of 1899, for the first time by a general treaty, nations in effect agreed that under certain circumstances, at least, they were morally bound, as were ordinary corporations or mere private individuals, to submit the merits of their disputes to impartial examination. The old doctrine that the king, as the representative of Deity, could do no wrong and the newer fiction that national governments were sovereign—beyond the ordinary gauges of right and wrong—and were their own courts of last resort upon the rightfulness of their actions toward other governments, subject only to the arbitrament of war, were measurably impaired, the signatory nations admitting fallibility and agreeing that, composed as they were of an aggregate of individuals, like their component parts they might err, and that the question as to whether they had erred or not could fairly be determined by other human beings, perhaps no wiser, but certainly more impartial than themselves.

The distinctive features of human progress in the nineteenth century were the advancement of natural science, discovery and invention, the growth of human freedom and political liberty, the unifying and nationalization of races into independent states and the development of the principle and the extension of the practice of international arbitration.

The average individual of these modern days views war with apprehension and alarm. To him it means loss, or risk, of life or limb, either for himself or for those dear to him, or loss of business opportunities and heavy taxes. The growth of socialistic and democratic doctrines has widely spread the historic truth that in the conflicts of the past, largely brought on by the selfish greed of the oligarchic few, the plain many, “the common herd,” Napoleon’s “food for powder,” have had their sufferings for their pains. And the heads of the aggregations of men we call “sovereign states”—the oligarchic few— softened by the spread of the civilizing influence of an industrial age, themselves begin to look on war askance, and to plan ways of avoiding it.

The members of the congress of Vienna who, for the most part, directed the international politics of Europe for the first half of the nineteenth century, have never been accounted as exponents of liberal thought, or as the advocates of liberal policies. But it must be said in behalf of their narrow and, at times, reactionary statesmanship, that it kept the peace in western Europe during the period intervening between the battle of Waterloo, which terminated the military and political activity of the first Napoleon, and the appearance of his nephew in the rôle of a military commander in the Italian campaign of 1859. For the first time in recorded history it was given to the harassed inhabitants of the Rhine provinces to see a full half century of peace, and to enjoy so much as fifty years of fortunate and uninterrupted immunity from the hardships and sacrifices of war.

In his letter asking me to make the opening address this morning, the secretary of the Society describes the topic as “ The Second Hague Conference and the Development of International Law as a Science.”

There is certainly nothing small and narrow about this text for a discourse, while at first blush it would seem to be made up of two parts not particularly related. Any impression of that sort is dispelled, however, by a little reflection.