It is my purpose to present to you some aspects of the work of the Department of State. In view of the nature and scope of the discussions at this meeting I do not need to emphasize the extraordinary importance of our international relations at this time. But I feel that such discussions, despite their wide range, would be inadequate unless they also served to bring about a better understanding on the part of the business men of the country of the essential instrumentality through which intercourse with foreign governments is conducted.

I desire to take this opportunity to present some observations on the conduct of our foreign relations, not to define particular policies, but to consider method and control.

Recent developments abroad have marked the passing of the old diplomacy and the introduction of more direct and flexible methods responsive to democratic sentiment. Peace-loving democracies have not been willing to rest content with traditions and practices which failed to avert the great catastrophe of the world war. Public criticism in some instances overshot the mark and becoming emotional enjoyed the luxury of a bitter and indiscriminate condemnation. The most skilled diplomats of Europe were charged with having become “enmeshed in formulae and the jargon of diplomacy”; with having “ceased to be conscious of pregnant realities”. More potent than the critics were the exigencies due to the war which required the constant contact and direct interchanges of responsible leaders.

Recent efforts to codify the international law of war have tended to differentiate more sharply between land warfare and naval warfare. But it is still frequently difficult to say where land warfare ends and naval warfare begins, and too little assistance is to be had from the few writers who have attempted to draw the line. The need of a clearly drawn line is evident when the capture of private property is being considered, for very different considerations apply in the two kinds of warfare. If a capture is governed by naval law, perplexing problems of prize court procedure may arise; but a seizure governed by land law is free from all necessity for prize court adjudication and confers a title which without more may be asserted in a neutral country.

That the laws of nations with respect to the right of visit and search, and the right of capture were well defined and established in 1914 can not be doubted. The best proof that there were such laws in force is the fact that there was not in the sisterhood of nations a single enlightened state whose prize courts had not undertaken to interpret and administer them, and to award damages for their violation. The interpretations of these courts may have varied, just as the interpretations of statutory law vary among the municipal courts of the same state, but there were, nevertheless, such laws, and they were interpreted. Furthermore, it would appear that by the courts of Great Britain and the United States in particular, they were interpreted and administered with as high a degree of uniformity as the same law is ordinarily interpreted and administered by the courts of two or more different states of the American Union.

In a maritime war the formal announcements of national executives concerning principles of intended action possess an interest frequently transcending the occasion calling them into being since they may originate important modifications in the imprescriptible system of the law of nations and thus become touched with that universality of which the sea itself offers so constant and striking a suggestion. In the conflicts of the French revolution and the First Empire, as well as in the great war of our own day, we find produced on the part of the opposing governments a series of declarations (orders in council, arrêts) which have a permanent interest for the student of international law since they practically extend over the whole field of naval warfare and reach every aspect of belligerent action upon the high seas, while they may also become a cause oftentimes of strained relations between belligerent and neutral Powers arising through widely varying views touching the application of prize law to marine captures.