sented Ethiopia, an actually sovereign state. Art. 10 of the constituent convention says: "Colonies may, at the request of the nations to which they belong, be admitted to form part of the Institute on the same condition as independent nations." Art. 3 says: "The general assembly of the Institute shall be composed of the representatives of the adhering governments." Australia, Canada, British India, New Zealand, Mauritius, the South African Union, Tunisia, Algeria, Eritrea and Italian Somaliland are the 10 non-sovereign territories now adhering to the work of the Institute, their position in it depending upon the quotas paid, which determine rank for classifying all members of the Institute and the number of the votes of each. It may be predicted that colonial representation will rapidly increase in this public union. The basis of repre BUREAU FOR PUBLICATION OF CUSTOM TARIFFS. sentation in this organization from its beginning has been the possession of a tariff, not political condition. As early as 1890, two years after the proposal of the union was made, 72 "countries or colonies" had adhered in principle. Publication of tariffs began on January 1, 1891, and on January 1, 1911, twenty years later, the bulletin of the union had published the tariffs of 158 separate political divisions of the world. How extensively it deals with non-sovereigns can be recognized from the fact that there are something like fifty sovereign states in existence. INTERNATIONAL SANITARY CONFERENCE. At the fourth conference in 1874, Egypt, whose affairs were discussed, was represented. At the ninth conference in 1894 British India participated in its own right and a British declaration 22 excepted Canada, Newfoundland, the Cape of Good Hope, Natal, New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia and New Zealand from the provisions of the convention unless "in their name, a notification to that effect shall have been addressed by Her Britannic Majesty's representative at Paris to the French minister of foreign affairs." 23 Great Britain as 22 British Treaty Series, No. 8, 1899, page 41. 23 This is, to my knowledge, the first instance of such differentiation in respect to an international convention. Separate colonial adherences to British, French, German and American bipartite treaties are now customary and are very numerous in the case of multipartite conventions. This custom gives color to the argument ad the métropole later notified the application of the convention to Cape Colony, Newfoundland, West Australia, Jamaica, the Windward Islands, Saint Helena and the Gold Coast. At the tenth conference in 1897 Egypt and the principality of Bulgaria were represented, but their delegates were not recorded in the alphabetic list of participants, being noted at the end of the general list. 24 At the eleventh conference in 1903 no non-sovereign countries participated. This is the extent of the admission of colonies into international affairs, and in this connection it is interesting to note the contents of a British Parliamentary Paper (Cd. 129, 1910) which was summarized in the London Times (Weekly Edition), June 3, 1910, page 410, with editorial in the same number. The correspondence reported a letter of June 28, 1895, by the Marquess of Ripon, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, in which he said: A foreign Power can only be approached through Her Majesty's representative, and any agreement entered into with it, affecting any part of Her Majesty's dominion, is an agreement between her Majesty and the sovereign of the foreign state, and it is to Her Majesty's Government that the foreign state would apply in case of any question arising under it. To give the colonies the power of negotiating treaties for themselves without reference to Her Majesty's Government would be to give them an international status as separate and sovereign states, and would be equivalent to breaking up the Empire into a number of independent states, a result which Her Majesty's Government are satisfied would be injurious equally to the colonies and to the mother country, and would be desired by neither. Commenting on this letter in a despatch to the chargé d'affaires at Paris on July 4, 1907, Sir Edward Grey said: I do not, however, think it necessary to adhere in the present case (negotiation of a Franco-Canadian commercial agreement) to the strict letter of this regulation, the object of which was to secure that negotiations should not be entered into and carried through by a colony unknown to and independent of His Majesty's Government. The selection of the negotiator is principally a matter of convenience, vanced here that multiple representation is likely to hinge on giving non-sovereign entities separate representation. 24 It may be recalled that the same distinction was made in the official reports of the First Hague Conference in the case of Bulgaria. and, in the present circumstances, it will obviously be more practical that the negotiations should be left to Sir W. Laurier and to the Canadian Minister of Finance, who will doubtless keep you informed of their progress. If the negotiations are brought to a conclusion at Paris, you should sign the agreement jointly with the Canadian negotiator, who would be given full powers for the purpose. The Times adds: "In a subsequent despatch the British Ambassador was authorized to agree, without any reference to the Secretary of State, to any verbal alterations in the text of the convention which the Canadian delegates might desire to make or accept." Here is a clear indication of a non-sovereign autonomy practically complete even concerning the negotiation of a treaty, and, as has just been shown, the colonial representation and independent voting power is already a reality in respect to administrative affairs. In the light of these practices, it is not unreasonable to expect an application for the admission of colonies into the diplomatic conferences of the future, not merely those dealing with technical negotiations, but also those deciding on legal questions. The self-governing parts of the British Empire have held an Imperial Conference in which the colonies discussed and negotiated as equals of the mother country, and since they have begun establishing their own armies and navies according to their specific needs, rather than as adjuncts of the British forces, the argument that they would be as much concerned with the legal problems of a Court of Arbitral Justice or an International Prize Court as any independent state would be a difficult one to rebut, being both new as an attack on the absolute equality theory and entirely logical in principle. Here is not the place to go farther into this important question. It is sufficient to state what is evidently a tendency and to hint that, in view of the past, the admission of colonial diplomatic delegates, probably with rank as ministers plenipotentiary in distinction from the ambassadors ad hoc of the mother country, is not at all an unlikely development of the future. In such a case, granting them a separate vote could be refused only with the greatest practical difficulty. The subject is worthy of much closer study and keener analysis than the writer's ability permits him to give it, but to him the fact seems patent that the necessity for representation in international organizations has brought forward what is practically a new voice in international relations, the non-sovereign territory. And this fact, applied to the practical matter of juridic equality, seems to warrant certain conclusions which are likely to have an important bearing upon the development of representation in conferences. Descriptively phrased these conclusions are: 1. Short of diplomatic participation and so long as it is definitely understood that the basis or object of the organization is administrative rather than diplomatic, there seems to be no inclination to exclude nonsovereigns from international organs. The test in this connection seems to be that the non-sovereign shall possess a distinct administrative department properly coming within the scope of the organ. 2. Self-governing non-sovereigns, which, in the British Empire, have practically assumed independent status except for a common bond of imperial interest, are showing a disposition to participate in international organs in a more definite manner than by the present theoretical representation through the diplomats of the actual sovereign. For the present, this tendency is satisfied by means of consultation and discussion of policy around what may be termed the family table of the sovereign. Self-governing non-sovereigns, however, are likely to have interests very diverse from the sovereign, and it is a grave question whether these interests can be successfully espoused through the envoys of the latter, especially when the actual political bond in all other respects is so tenuous. The problem of the admission of self-governing non-sovereigns is almost sure to come before international diplomatic conferences in the future, because of a presumptive desire of the sovereign to exert a voting power more in accordance with its actual importance than can be granted under the present system, and also to avoid the unsatisfactory necessity of representing, at second hand, the interests of considerable territories which practically control their own affairs. DENYS P. MYERS. BOARD OF EDITORS OF THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW CHANDLER P. ANDERSON, New York, N. Y. CHARLES NOBLE GREGORY, George Washington University. AMOS S. HERSHEY, Indiana University. CHARLES CHENEY HYDE, Northwestern University. GEORGE W. KIRCHWEY, Columbia University. ROBERT LANSING, Watertown, N. Y. JOHN BASSETT MOORE, Washington, D. C. Editor in Chief JAMES BROWN SCOTT, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, D. C. Business Manager GEORGE A. FINCH, 2 Jackson Place, Washington, D. C. EDITORIAL COMMENT THE EIGHTH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE SOCIETY The Eighth Annual Meeting of the Society will be held this year as usual during the last week of April. The Committee on the Eighth Annual Meeting has decided to divide the sessions into three groups for the separate consideration of three different subjects which the Committee has deemed it advisable that the Society should consider. In the first place, the prominence given by recent events to the Monroe Doctrine and its application, led the Committee to decide that a thorough discussion of the Monroe Doctrine in all its phases by competent and impartial speakers would be a useful piece of work for the Society to undertake. It is expected that the subject will be subdivided |