A year ago, when an attempt was made in this Joubnal to describe the inauguration of the Permanent Court of International Justice and the beginning of its work,1 it seemed that a new experiment in international relations was on trial. But such has been its progress in two years that the court now appears to be one of the established institutions in our international life. The Foreign Offices have begun to regard it as a sort of international fixture. It is fast accumulating a record of achievement indispensable to the international law of the future, and the court now bids fair to be permanent in influence as in name.

The task of codifying international law is so vast, the subject thus named so uncertain in nature and in limits, language so imperfect and misleading, and human reason so puny, that a person who addresses himself to the business with the intention of elaborating concrete expressions of the law finds himself with no solid foothold to start from, no certain direction to take, and no clear conviction as to how best to work. In the present attempt to study the problem of codification of international law in a few of its aspects, the writer has taken one topic only, the treaty, thinking that here we have phenomena in plenty and that discussion thereof may be a fruitful preliminary procedure. For even here, at the very outset, we are confronted with primary questions which throw us back to the very threshold as it were of the whole subject.

When the World War, in which aircraft was employed for the first time on an extensive scale as an instrument of combat, broke out, there were few conventional rules and naturally little or no customary law in existence governing the conduct of hostilities in the air. There was, to be sure, the declaration prohibiting for a period of five years the launching of projectiles and explosives from balloons or by other new methods of a similar nature, signed at The Hague in 1899 and renewed in 1907 for a period extending to the close of the third peace conference. Since the third conference has never been convoked, the declaration may be regarded as still binding onthe states which have ratified it, in a war in which both or all the belligerents are contracting parties. But it is significant that only about half the states represented at the second conference signed the declaration, and among those which did not were Germany, France, Russia, Spain and Italy. It thus happens that the principal military states of Europe are not parties to it and its value therefore is slight. In consequence of the so-called “solidarity” clause it was not binding upon any of the belligerents during the World War, not even upon those which had ratified it.

The circumstances which led to the creation of the Far Eastern Republic as a new Russian state on terms of such perfect amity with the mother country that it was recognized immediately by her and received her warm financial and diplomatic support run back to the revolutions of 1917 in Russia. In Siberia the March Revolution was heartily welcomed and the Zemstvos took over the government. The bulk of the population was content with the abolition of Tzarism but the minority of communists started a Bolshevistic propaganda which succeeded after the November revolution, due to the energy of the communists, the armed help of Moscow and the apathy of the peasants. There was, however, a second minority composed of supporters of the old regime and its opposition to the organization of a soviet system in Siberia led to civil war.

Eastern Carelia is composed of the governments of Kemi, Archangel or the Provinces of Viena, Poventsa, Petroskoi, and the Olonets. It is bounded on the west by the eastern frontier of Finland, on the south by Lake Ladoga and the River Svir, on the east by Lake Onega and the White Sea, and on the north by the Arctic Ocean. It is about 300,000 square kilometers inarea with a population of about 175,000 people. Of these 134,000 are Carelians of the Fenno-Ugrian stock; and the remaining 41,000, who speak Russian to a greater or less degree, are Vepses, Carelians, Finns, Laplanders, and Russians.