is chimerical, as when it proposes that discharged officials emigrate. In the meantime the American dollar can buy 71,000 krona.

HE DIFFICULTIES facing Europe are not entirely international. Each nation has plenty of problems

been wiped out, as was Rumania. The fact, however, is that Constantine sided with the Central Powers, was exiled from his country, returned to his place as king, and was defeated by the Turks. Once again he is in exile.

T IS encouraging to have our Secretary of Commerce

a political volcano with inexhaustible lava of ideas. Hungary is loaded with Hungarians returned to her from territories which she lost as a result of the war. The problem of minorities in Czechoslovakia is acute. In Sofia over half of the members of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences have been arrested; they are now held as political prisoners. The Fascisti are theatening the overthrow of the Italian Government. The opposition to Lloyd-George in Great Britain seems at last to be organized and articulate. We hear much of English, Italian, German policies. No European State has a policy which is not attacked by a considerable number

at home.

HROUGHOUT the Western World there is a prevaila ing friendship for Greece. This is a natural result of the benefits that Greece, next only to Christianity itself, has conferred upon our civilization. Yet the peoples of the victorious nations in the World War will for the most part be pleased to note the downfall of Kaiser Wilhelm's brother-in-law, Constantine, King of Greece. Most Christians regret to hear of the success of the Turkish armies, but they have not forgotten Constantine's allegiance to their enemies. The United States has consistently refused to recognize the Constantine régime. It was undoubtedly a sad day for Greece when she took him back from exile in 1920. Venizelos might have carried through his Ionian policy, made Smyrna the Greek city he believed it ought to be, obtained the recognition and support of Britain, France, Italy; but Constantine was not big enough for the business.

Of course, the late king's supporters will defend him. It will be said that he did not send the Greek army into Asia Minor. True, but he kept the army there to his own undoing. It will be said with regard to the SerboGreek treaty it was repudiated not by Constantine, but by Serbia, before the beginning of the World War. But that is now ancient history. Constantine may have warned the German Emperor not to allow the Bulgarians to pursue the Allies into Greek territory; it may be that he agreed at one time to furnish rifles to the Allies; it may be true that had Greece joined with the Allies in the early stages of the war, she would have

States can be paid "without undue strain" and within a reasonable period of time. Mr. Hoover has real sources of information, and he undoubtedly speaks for the present Administration. He bases his statement upon the fact that payments for interest and amortization between the continental nations of Europe would amount to about $350,000,000 yearly, which is from 2 to 12 per cent of their governmental income. Since this is the fact, there can be but one reason for the failure

of European nations to pay; that is war. If Europe can have peace, she can pay. It would add immeasurably to the weal of the world if Europe should establish peace and pay. If Europe does not pay, the financial system of the world will be strained to the limit. If another European war begins, the miseries of the world will increase incalculably. All the complications involved in our present-day snarl are man-made. It ought to be reasonable to hope that man can cease his sins and behave.

The whole question is a question of enlightened selfinterest. Our own opinion is that there is intelligence enough left among the European States to readjust economic boundaries, to reduce armaments, to balance budgets. Once again, however, the intelligence will be inoperative without a marked increase of good-will. There is good-will in Europe, but there is not enough. Perhaps the realization that aid from the United States is contingent upon evidences of a greater good-will have an ameliorating influence upon the distressing acerbities.

RETURN

BY GILBERT RIDDELL

Where have you been, my soldier son?
I? I have walked through hell.
What have you seen, my warrior brave?
I? Things I dare not tell.
What have you heard, my darling lad?
I? Words that sear the soul.
What have you done, my tender boy?
I? Things of monstrous mold.
What did you feel in those dreadful hours?
Anger, and fear, and pain.
What is this bauble, my darling son?
All that I went to gain.

Hannis Taylor

THE TRIUMPH OF AMERICAN

DIPLOMACY

By HANNIS TAYLOR

Author of "International Public Law"; sometime Minister
Plenipotentiary of the United States to Spain; Hon.

LL. D. of the University of Edinburgh
and Dublin

(In order to illustrate the importance, from an historical point of view, of President Harding's epoch-making offer to arbitrate between Europe and Asia the Hon. Hannis Taylor has prepared this monograph, in which our diplomatic history, now covering nearly a century and a half, is unfolded as a stirring drama in six acts. In the first is described the organization of the family of nations at the time our infant Republic became an humble member of it; in the second is described our first contribution in the form of the modern and existing law of neutrality; in the third is traced the origin and growth of the Monroe Doctrine; in the fourth is

noted the extension of that Doctrine to the Pacific Ocean; in the fifth is explained the circumstances under which our supreme arbitrating power in this hemisphere was defined; in the sixth is set forth the real nature of the first international conference ever held on the soil of the New World

in which this Republic assumed the rôle of supreme arbitrator between Europe and Asia. Only in the light of its historical antecedents can that crowning triumph of American diplomacy be fully understood.)-THE EDITOR.

there is no institution that is not the natural, perhaps inevitable, outcome of its antecedents. Only by the aid of that process of reasoning is it possible to grasp the comprehensive thought embodied in the phrase "the family of nations." Without some knowledge of its historical antecedents it is impossible to describe the vast diplomatic organization, broad bottomed on international law, which now shelters within its fold the civilzed nations of the world of today.

The separate nationalities, each with its own character, language, and institutions, which arose out of the wreck of the empire of Charles the Great, passed through a long childhood under the protecting wings of an institution known as the Holy Roman Empire that illustrated for centuries the enduring power of a political theory. The chiefs of that comprehensive society were the Roman Emperor and the Roman Pontiff, the one standing at its head in its temporal character as an empire and the other standing at its head in its spiritual character as a church. The Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church were, according to medieval theory, two aspects of a single Christian monarchy whose mission it was to shelter beneath its wings all the nations of the earth. No matter to what extent the Holy Roman Empire may have failed as an international power, whether arbitrating on its spiritual side through the Pope and the canon law or on its temporal side through the Emperor and the imperial law, the fact remains that for centuries it was the one bond of cohesion holding Europe together under the spell of a theory that assumed to provide a complete system of international justice and a supreme tribunal adequate to the settlement of all controversies that could possibly arise between Christian nations.

THE EARTHQUAKE KNOWN AS THE REFORMATION

No matter whether the Holy Roman Empire was a theory or an institution, not until the conception of a united Christendom it embodied was wrecked by the Reformation was the field cleared for the growth of international law as now understood.

For the older form of a universal faith uniting Christians of all nations the Lutheran States substituted the

principle of territorial religion which acknowledged the right of each nation to determine the form of belief that should prevail within its own bounds. From that premise were drawn the two fundamental postulates of the new international system; first, that each State is sovereign and independent, and as such coequal with all the rest; second, that territory and jurisdiction are coextensive. Such was the practical outcome of the terrible Thirty Years' War closed in 1648 by the peace of Westphalia. "That peace set the final seal on the disintegration of the world empire at once of Pope and Emperor, and made possible the complete realization of the doctrine of Grotius, the doctrine of the sovereignty of States. The Peace of Westphalia did not create international law, but it made a true science of international law realizable." Such was the general character of the treaty settlement made during the year 1648, in the first body that can be called a diplomatic congress in the modern sense of that term-a settlement that survived without a break as the public law of Europe down to the French Revolution.

GROTIUS AND THE NEW INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM

The postulate that each State as a member of the family of nations is sovereign and independent, and as such coequal with all the rest, settled the fact that no one of them could be made to bow to a common superior save through its own consent. As the common superior furnished by the Holy Roman Empire had been swept away by the Reformation, the Dutch jurist, Grotius, placed upon the vacant throne as a substitute for him a book published in 1625, called "De Jure Belli ac Pacis." The laws of war and peace embodied in that compilation had been drawn from a single source. The epoch-making work of Grotius, brilliant as it was, simply involved an application of one branch of Roman private law known as the jus gentium-the law common to all nations to States instead of to individuals. His genius consisted entirely of his ability to extract from that body of rules known as the jus gentium, applied by the Romans only between man and man, a code adequate for the regulation, by common consent, of the new international relations established between the Christian States of western Europe after the Holy Roman Empire had ceased to be an international bond between them.

CONCERT OF EUROPE AND THE BALANCE OF
POWER

After the Peace of Westphalia had established the existence of the family of nations as a fact, and after Grotius had furnished it with a code of family law whose rules it agreed to observe, it was discovered that it could not operate as a going concern without the direction of a governing committee, known as the Concert of Europe, whose main business it has ever been to preserve what is called the "balance of power." The theory that the equality and legal rights of the greatest and smallest States are identical has never been carried out in practice. Such rights and such equality have always been subject to the irresistible power vested by the higher or conventional law in a committee composed of the representatives of a few of the greater States acting in behalf of the whole. Down to the World War nothing was better understood in European diplomacy than the fact that a primacy or overlordship was vested in the concert composed at last of Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Austria-a combination into which Italy was admitted in 1867. That primacy or overlordship gradually developed outside of the written treaty law, since the Peace of Westphalia represented the common superior who actually succeeded to the place made vacant by the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire as an international power.

ENTRY OF THE UNITED STATES INTO THE FAMILY OF NATIONS

Only in the light of such a preface is it possible to understand the conditions under which our infant Republic, situated upon the eastern shores of the mainland of the Western Hemisphere, became a member of the family of nations whose habitat was and is in the western section of the Eastern Hemisphere. By the mighty ocean dividing the Old World from the New the entire after-history has been profoundly impressed. Before the close of the American Revolution the Congress of

the United States, which under the Articles of Confederation possessed jurisdiction over all questions arising under the law of nations, in its ordinance of December 4, 1781, concerning maritime captures, professed obedience to that law "according to the general usages of Europe"; and by the terms of the second Federal Constitution of 1789 treaties were made the supreme law of the land, binding the nation as a whole and all subordinate authorities and judges of every State.

AMERICA'S CONTRIBUTION TO THE LAW OF
NEUTRALITY

All who study the growth of law in a scientific way understand that physical geography is ever a prime factor in the history of its development. Out of the isolated position assigned us by physical geography have arisen our contributions to the law of neutrality. That law, incompatible with the theory of the medieval empire, and which supplied no rule as to neutral duty in the sixteenth century, had made so little progress by the end of the first quarter of the seventeenth that it may be said not to have advanced up to that time beyond the stage of theory.

In the words of the English publicist, Hall: "In 1627 the English captured a French ship in Dutch waters; in 1631 the Spaniards attacked the Dutch in a Dutch port; in 1639 the Dutch were in turn the aggressors, and attacked the Spanish fleet in English waters; again, in 1666, they captured English vessels in the Elbe, and in spite of the remonstrance of Hamburg and of several other German States, did not restore them; in 1664 an English fleet endeavored to seize the Dutch East India squadron in the harbor of Bergen, but were beaten off with the help of the forts; finally, in 1693, the French attempted to cut some Dutch ships out of Lisbon, and on being prevented by the guns of the place from carrying them off, burnt them in the river." In 1793 the French frigate Modeste was captured in the harbor of Genoa by two English men-of-war, and it was neither restored nor was an apology made for the violation of Genoese neutrality.

In the very year in which Genoese neutrality was thus ruthlessly violated by the greatest of sea powers an infant Republic, with an interest and ambition to be a sea power, resolved to bring about a revolution by adding a new chapter on neutrality to the law of nations. The war then raging between Great Britain and revolutionary France opened up an enticing opportunity to the famous clipper ships of New England, which President Washington, guided by the diplomatic hand of Jefferson, promptly approved by the issuance of his epoch-making neutrality proclamation of April 22, 1793. In that pronouncement the Government of the United States undertook to define what it considered to be the obligations then incumbent upon neutrals, representing by far the most advanced existing opinions as to what those obligations really were. And in some particulars it went even further than authoritative international custom has up to the present time advanced.

When the French minister, Genet, attempted to violate the neutrality of the United States, as thus defined, President Washington insisted upon his recall; and at a later day far graver consequences resulted to Napoleon, whose fall was brought about through his invasion of

Russia, a desperate enterprise into which he was driven. at last by the refusal of Alexander I to uphold his oppressive "continental system" of blockade through the exclusion from Russian ports of the neutral flag of the American merchant marine. Thus it has been said that it was the prows of the clipper ships of New England that caused the imposing fabric of Napoleonic statecraft and diplomacy to collapse like a house of cards in 1812, 1813, and 1814. And to the same source may be traced the War of 1812, that grew out of the assertion upon the part of Great Britain of a claim of visitation and search entirely incompatible with the neutrality code proclaimed by Washington in 1793.

ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE MONROE DOCTRINE

Just as the physiography of North America preordained the new American doctrine of neutrality, it preordained what is generally known as the Monroe Doctrine. The two new chapters thus introduced into the modern law of nations were drafted by the same statesman-Thomas Jefferson. As Europe, Asia, and Africa are confined within the limits of the Eastern Hemisphere, it is not strange that one great central and powerful State should have established its hegemony or overlordship over the Western. The beginnings of that overlordship were prompted directly by the action of Great Britain, eager to secure to herself the permanent posses

sion of certain commercial interests in Latin American trade which she had taken during the Napoleonic wars from a continental rival. All of the European nations that planted colonies in the New World regarded them simply as plantations whose trade was the absolute possession of the mother State. Therefore with the rich and fruitful plantations founded by Spain in this hemisphere Great Britain had no right to trade so long as they were subject to the political sovereignty of their mother country. Not until after that sovereignty had been repudiated, not until after the Spanish colonies in America had established their independence, was Great Britain able to rush in and add that new domain to her everwidening commercial empire.

In the summer of 1823, after that rich prize had been thus secured, the Holy Alliance notified Great Britain that so soon as France should complete the overthrow of the revolutionary government of Spain a congress would be called for the purpose of terminating the revolutionary governments of South America. In order to defeat that design, fatal to the interests of the British merchants, who had built up a great trade with Spain's revolted colonies as independent communities, Canning, who had succeeded Castlereagh, began to correspond with Mr. Rush, the American minister at London, as to the advantages of a joint declaration by Great Britain and the United States against the threat of the alliance to extend its interference to Spain's relations with her colonies in this hemisphere. With consummate art, perhaps unnecessary, Canning suggested that nothing could be a greater indignity to this Republic than the overthrow, by a combination of European monarchs, of the group of revolutionary governments whose right to independence rested upon the same foundation as our own. And he added that if the United States should determine to resist such an aggression every man in the Brit

ish army and every ship in the British navy would be at our disposal.

After Mr. Rush had forwarded this momentous correspondence to President Monroe, he did not waste a moment in placing it for action in the hands of the lonely old statesman at Monticello, who for 24 years was really President of the United States. In assuming a task which Monroe admitted was entirely beyond his abilities, Jefferson, in his famous letter of October 24, 1823, deemed it proper to say to him: "The question presented by the letters you have sent me is the most momentous which has been offered to my contemplation since that of independence. That made up a nation; this sets our compass and points the course which we are to steer through the ocean of time opening on us. And never could we embark upon it under circumstances more auspicious. Our first and fundamental maxim should be never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe; our second, never to suffer Europe to intermeddle with cis-Atlantic affairs. America, North and South, has a set of interests distinct from those of Europe and peculiarly her own. She should, therefore, have a system of her own, separate and apart from that of Europe."

He then proceeded to say: "One nation, most of all, could disturb us in this pursuit; she now offers to lead, aid, and accompany us in it. By acceding to her proposition we detach her from the bands, bring her mighty weight into the scale of free government, and emancipate a continent at one stroke, which might otherwise linger in doubt and difficulty. Great Britain is the nation which can do us the most harm of any one or all on earth, and with her on our side we need not fear the whole world. With her, then, we should most sedulously cherish a cordial friendship, and nothing would tend more to knit our affections than to be fighting once more side by side in the same cause. But we have first to ask ourselves a question: Do we wish to acquire to our confederacy any one or more of the Spanish provinces? I cordially confess that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States. The control which, with Florida Point, this island would give us over the Gulf of Mexico and the countries and isthmus bordering on it, as well as those whose waters flow into it, would fill up the measure of our political well-being."

had been completed, it was cordially approved by exAfter the epoch-making letter to President Monroe President Madison, who was near at hand at Montpelier, and also by Calhoun, then Secretary of War, who declared that he believed that the alliance "had an ultimate eye on us; that they would, if not resisted, subdue South America. Violent parties would arise in this country, one for and one against them, and we should have to fight upon our own shores for our institutions." The new American system as thus outlined by Jefferson, primarily for the protection of American institutions against European interference, passed to the Congress of the United States through President Monroe as a conduit, and in passing took his name. In his seventh annual message, delivered December 2, 1823, he said that "in the wars of the European powers, in matters relating to themselves, we have never taken any part, nor does it comport with our policy to do so. It is

only when our rights are involved or seriously menaced that we resent injuries or make preparations for our defense. With the movements in this hemisphere we are of necessity more immediately connected, and by causes which must be obvious to all enlightened and impartial observers. The political system of the allied powers is essentially different in this respect from that of America. . . We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety."

PURELY A CREATION OF EXECUTIVE POWER

Such was the beginning of the new and unique chapter in the law of nations, called the Monroe Doctrine, which has been written into it by the pens of American Presidents and Secretaries of State; it is purely a creation of executive power. And, like every other institution that has been the result of growth, it did not attain its full stature in a night; it did not spring into life fully armed. Its present dimensions are the result of a century of persistent and progressive development. Pending the controversy with Great Britain as to the Oregon Territory, and in the face of possible intervention by European powers on account of the annexation of Texas, President Polk, in his message of December 2, 1845, greatly widened the protest of President Monroe against future colonization by any European powers when he said that "it should be distinctly announced to the world as our settled policy that no future European colony or dominion shall, with our consent, be planted or established on any part of the North American Continent." And when in 1865 it became necessary for the United States to terminate the intervention of France in the internal affairs of Mexico, notice was then given that friendship with that country must cease, "unless France could deem it consistent with her interest and honor to desist from the prosecution of armed intervention in Mexico to overthrow the domestic republican government existing there, and to establish upon its ruins the foreign monarchy which has been attempted to be inaugurated in the capital of that country." More More complete expression was given to the aspirations of the United States on this subject by Mr. Fish when in his report of July 14, 1870, to President Grant he said: "This policy is not a policy of aggression, but it opposes the creation of European dominion on American soil or its transfer to other European powers, and it looks hopefully to the time when, by the voluntary departure of European governments from this continent and the adjacent islands, America shall be wholly American.”

OUR SUPREME ARBITRATING POWER IN THIS HEMISPHERE FIRST DEFINED IN VENEZUELAN CASE

Not, however, until the opportunity was given by the boundary controversy between Great Britain and Venezuela was the inevitable declaration finally made that the same reasons that impel the Concert of Europe to guard the balance of power in the Old World prompt the Government of the United States to maintain its primacy in the New. In the words of President Cleveland, who first

gave to the Monroe Doctrine complete and scientific definition, "If the balance of power is justly a cause for jealous anxiety among the governments of the Old World and a subject for our own absolute non-interference, none the less is an observance of the Monroe Doctrine of vital concern to our people and their government.”

To that a great Secretary of State, Richard Olney. added: "Today the United States is practically sovereign on this continent and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interpositions." Thus, in a clear and consistent form, was finally reached the conclusion that the same supreme directing and arbitrating power which in the Old World is vested in the Concert of Europe is in the New vested in the Government of the United States, acting alone. In the words of a distinguished English publicist, T. J. Lawrence: "The supremacy of a committee of States and the supremacy of a single State cannot be exercised in the same manner. What in Europe is done after long and tedious negotiations and much discussion between representatives of no less than six countries can be done in America by the discussion of one Cabinet, discussing in secret at Washington." When the Government of Great Britain justly and wisely conceded the right of arbitration thus asserted by the United States, solely by virtue of its primacy or overlordship in the New World, a final settlement was made of the place of this Republic in the family of nations.

EXTENSION OF MONROE DOCTRINE TO PACIFIC

WORLD

Almost at the outset of his famous message of December 2, 1823, President Monroe, prompted by a controversy then pending as to unsettled boundaries in the Northwest that grew out of a ukase issued by the Czar of Russia in September, 1821, in which he had asserted exclusive territorial rights from the extreme northern limit of the continent to the fifty-first parallel of north latitude, had undertaken to extend the new American system as outlined by Jefferson to the Pacific world. Against the ukase of the Czar, proposing a territorial establishment on the northwest coast of this continent, President Monroe had presented substantially the same protest he had made against the intervention of the Holy Alliance in the affairs of South America. When Russia proposed an amicable settlement of the matter John Quincy Adams, then Secretary of State, said to the Russian minister at a conference held on July 17, 1823. "That we should contest the right of Russia to any territorial establishment on this continent, and that we should assume distinctly the principle that the American continents are no longer subjects for any new colonial establishments." On July 2 Mr. Adams had written to Mr. Rush, our minister at London, that a "necessary consequence of this state of things will be that the American continent henceforth will no longer be subject to colonization. Occupied by civilized nations, they will be accessible to Europeans and each other on that footing alone; and the Pacific Ocean, in every part of it, will remain open to the navigation of all nations in like manner with the Atlantic."