President Wilson asserted in 1917 that “neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable where the peace of the world is involved and the freedom of its people.” In March, 1920, at its second session, the League of Nations Council affirmed that “the conception of neutrality of the members of the League is incompatible with the principle that all members will be obliged to cooperate in enforcing respect for their engagements.” In 1929 the British Foreign Office officially declared that “as between members of the League there can be no neutral rights because there can be no neutrals.” And in 1932 Secretary of State Stimson declared in reference to the Pact of Paris that “hereafter when two nations engage in armed conflict either one or both of them must be wrongdoers—violators of the general treaty. We no longer draw a circle about them and treat them with the punctilios of a duelist’s code. Instead we denounce them as law-breakers.”

The return of maritime warfare in the Atlantic and Pacific, and the proclamation by the United States of its neutrality in the existing state of war, raise anew important questions of law concerning the Panama Canal. While there is an abundant literature on the history of the Canal project, on the Panama Revolution, the Tolls controversy, the economic importance of the Canal and the cost of its defense, little has been written on the legal status of the Canal as a completed and operating institution. No complete survey of the treaties, laws, executive orders, regulations, agreements, opinions and decisions, and diplomatic correspondence seems to exist. Only by a laborious consultation of source materials, not all of which are easily accessible, can a comprehensive picture of the legal situation be pieced together. It is hoped that the treatment which follows may help to fill this lacuna.

At the beginning of this war, September 3, 1939, the usual legal concept of the term “enemy alien,” as it was known in the war of 1914–1918, appeared again in Great Britain, France, and Germany. Great Britain, in the Enemy Act of 1939, defines an enemy subject as “an individual who not being either a British subject or a British protected person, possesses the nationality of a state at war with His Majesty the King”; France defines the term as “les ressortissants ennemis”; the Reich, as aliens belonging to an enemy state, and includes those persons without nationality who before the loss of their nationality were citizens of an enemy Power.

“We await a jurist with the mastery of the legal materials, the philosophical vision, and the juristic faith which enabled Grotius to set up a law of nations almost at one stroke,” declared Dean Pound in concluding his address before the Thirty-Third Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law on “The Idea of Law in International Relations.” That is a statement which challenges the attention and arouses the curiosity of a present-day international lawyer. Although accustomed as such a lawyer is to the notion of Grotius as the founder and father of the law of nations, it is a little startling to be told that the answer to the current dilemma of international law is contingent upon the advent of a jurist with his accomplishments. What is there in his De Jure Belli ac Pads to warrant such confidence? What would he have to offer as a guide to a lawyer seeking to extend and to reenforce the domain of law in international relations?

One of the most distinct features of European imperialism in its nineteenth century form was the peculiar alliance between missionary activity in backward areas and the political exploitation of the same for reasons of prestige, strategy or economics. No better example of this alignment can be found than in the French protectorate exercised over Roman Catholic missionary activity in China. Here the establishment of a definite political protectorate in the nineteenth century has a long historical background in which one may trace the transition from what G. L. Beer called “The Old Colonial System” to imperialism in its modern form. The question of “origins” here follows a sequence from Portuguese conquests and the Patronage (Padroado) in the Far East through the period of French expansion under Louis XIV to the final acceptance by the European world of the French protectorate over all Catholic missions in China.