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"Here," this writer continues, "is where a community of European citizenship beckons us. Thus the Continent would be delivered from its money stringency; thus it would gently be obliged to bury quickly and deeply the useless reminders of futile conflict."

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It is time for Germany, if she would ever regain the respect of mankind, to dismiss such fantastic illusions as these, and to take up the burden of national responsibility in a serious sense. Let her, first of all, sustain a government that will admit the responsibility of the nation for the past, and with which it is possible to deal. Then let that government assume and enforce those obligations which a just peace will certainly impose upon the German nation; not forgetting that the greatest possible calamity to mankind would be to write into the Law of Nations, by absolving the German people from complicity in a national crime, the ruinous principle that a "people" is not responsible for the government it supports, and that it may therefore exempt itself from

merited punishment by merely changing its form of government.

Has Germany the character to stand this test? When she has proved her ability to do so, then, and only then, can there be a possibility, when years of fidelity have established her good faith, of admitting her to a place in a League of Nations. If those who are gathering to conclude peace cannot now enforce that judgment, then it is more than futile to hope to enforce such a judgment in the future; for the contingencies of a future in which so great a crime was left unpunished would be simply appalling to contemplate.

III

INTERNATIONAL LAW AND POLICY

Ar no time, perhaps, since history began to be recorded has there existed so profound and so universal a conviction of the value and necessity of law; and particularly of the restraint of law in controlling the activities of independent sovereign States.

Everywhere the necessities, even more than the volitions, of men have in some form, established the authority of the State; whose laws, even though occasionally violated, are regarded as paramount over the populations within their jurisdiction. A comparative study of law discloses the fact that, with slight and almost negligible divergences, the great principles of jurisprudence accepted in all the most highly developed communities are not only similar but virtually identical. As a result, that body of customary law common to different nations, to which the

Roman jurisconsults gave the name Jus Gentium, and which became the basis of what we now call International Law, was believed, until the events of the Great War disturbed the conviction, to have attained a consistency of content and a degree of general acceptance by responsible States which placed beyond all serious question its authority as law.

There is, as we all know, some diversity of view as to what constitutes the law in general. If it were otherwise it would be a very stale and unprofitable profession.

As regards the Law of Nations, which has temporarily fallen into disrepute as even more vague and uncertain than other branches of the law, notwithstanding the aspersions cast upon it, there is the highest authority, based on judicial decisions, for asserting with Sir William Blackstone that, "whenever any question arises which is properly the object of its jurisdiction," it is in England "adopted in its full extent by the Common Law, and is held to be a part of the law of the land"; and we may also cite the

opinion of Alexander Hamilton, that it is not only a part of the Common Law, but "has become by adoption that of the United States."

If these vindications of the respectability of the Law of Nations seem somewhat antiquated, I may, perhaps, be permitted to recall the fact that, in his address before the New York State Bar Association, last year, the eminent Attorney-General of Great Britain, Sir Frederick Smith, informed his hearers that when, during the war, it became his official duty to urge upon the Privy Council the idea that no prize court in Great Britain had the right to challenge or call in question the Orders in Council of His Majesty the King, the Appellate Prize Court decided against the contention of the Attorney-General and declared: "We sit here as a Court of International Law, and in spite of what our enemies have done we still believe there are binding doctrines of International Law, and sitting here as we do sit as a Court, whose duty it is to construe those doctrines,

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