During the year 1938, the seventeenth year of its existence, the Permanent Court of International Justice was in active session for a total of 69 days—from April 29 to June 30; on July 13 and 14; and from November 28 to December 1. This compares with 107 days of active session in 1937, 143 days in 1936, and 107 days in 1935.

In his world broadcast on September 27, 1938, immediately after his conversations at Godesberg with Chancellor Hitler, Prime Minister Chamberlain pointed out that he had gained the Czech Government’s consent to the Berchtesgaden proposals which “gave the substance of what Herr Hitler wanted,” and that he “was taken completely by surprise” when at Godesberg he “found that he [Hitler] insisted that the territory should be handed over to him immediately, and immediately occupied by German troops without previous arrangement for safeguarding the people within the territory who were not Germans or did not want to join the German Reich.” This attitude he found “unreasonable” but added that in spite of sympathy “with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbor we can not in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in war simply on her account. If we have to fight it must be on a larger issue than that. I am myself a man of peace . . . but if I were convinced that any nation had made up its mind to dominate the world by fear of its force, I should feel that it must be resisted.”

Perhaps no other problem of international law plays at the present time such an important rôle as the problem of revision, or, as it is now called with a new and rather ambiguous term, “peaceful change.” This is in itself a change. For whereas advanced municipal laws naturally contain provisions for the change of the positive law by legislation or by constitutional amendments, the problem was, up to a short time ago, nearly wholly neglected in international law, both practically and theoretically. International law was primarily static, as indeed are all primitive juridical orders. Not only were the great peace treaties since 1648 meant to be perpetual, but even proposals de lege ferenda were purely static.

Professor A. L. Goodhart, of Oxford, in a paper on “The Nature of International Law” indicates a field of research which has hitherto been somewhat neglected by international lawyers. He suggests that “some of the most distinguished writers on international law have not sufficiently emphasised in their definitions of international law the essential part played by the community.” This criticism does not, in our opinion, apply only to the definition of international law. None of its main issues, such as recognition, state responsibility, protection of nationals and property abroad, extradition, neutrality, intervention, or the rules of warfare, can be seen in their proper perspective if we disregard this background and the fundamental changes now taking place in the social environment which Professor Goodhart calls the “community.”

There are two generally accepted modes of classifying insurgent governments: (1) according to their purpose, and (2) according to their success or failure. If the aim of an insurgent government is to secede and form a new state, it is normally referred to as a seceding government; and if its aim is to overthrow and replace the de jure government within the old state, it is normally spoken of as a mere insurgent government.