On December 30, 1929, a manifesto was issued by the Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs stating that “The Chinese Government is compelled to declare that the year 1930 is the decisive time, and that the actual process of reestablishing Chinese sovereignty by the abolition of extraterritoriality begins on January 1. With that in view it will undertake measures designed to release the sovereign rights of China from the trammels of extraterritoriality, and has accordingly ordered the Executive Yuan and the Judicial Yuan to instruct the ministries concerned to prepare a plan for this purpose.” While this indicates a determination to hasten the abolition of extraterritoriality, it also indicates a desire to do so by a legal process. It has been recognized that the conclusion of new treaties is the appropriate process and this method has actually been illustrated by treaties conditionally eliminating extraterritoriality with Belgium, Italy, Denmark, Portugal and Spain. These treaties were made under normal conditions and probably indicate the kind of treaty China would like to conclude with the remaining Powers enjoying extraterritoriality.

The first thirty years of the nineteenth century saw the beginnings of a great revolution in transportation and communication. Improvements were introduced which in time greatly changed the daily lives of people throughout the world, and made it possible for their efforts to reach out as never before in human history. The change was nowhere more significant than in its effect on international society. A century ago, the railroad, the steamship and the telegraph so extended the range of human action that national organization ceased to correspond with the activities of many peoples, and the state system upon which the nineteenth century dawned was greatly modified by the progress made in international organization before the century had passed. Certainly no period up to that time had produced such changes as those which began in the decades between 1800 and 1830.

This new treaty edition is to be entitled Treaties and Other International Acts of the United States of America. The title requires some explanation as to its extent and limits. Agreements or acts which have gone into force are, with certain exceptions noted hereafter, included in the volumes of this edition now to be considered. Unperfected treaties, to use the current expression— agreements which have not gone into force—are in general, therefore, and subject to the exception mentioned below, excluded. It is to be observed that in a broad sense “unperfected treaties” include those which have been definitely rejected as well as those which are to be deemed pending; and there are also a few instances where an agreement was not formally acted on but is so ancient as to be obsolete. All those unperfected treaties, however, of whatever classification, are here omitted, with the exception of such of them as may be within one group of documents now to be mentioned.

Although the Constitution of the United States declares in the Fourteenth Amendment that all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States, Congress has enacted legislation affecting the diplomatic protection of citizens abroad which makes a material distinction between persons born in the United States and those who have been naturalized in this country. This distinction has caused considerable discussion as to the political status of naturalized American citizens against whom the presumption of cessation of citizenship has arisen by virtue of the provisions of Section 2, Act of March 2, 1907, and recently has been interestingly illustrated before international claims commissions.

The year 1792 marks the beginning of the long European struggle which started as the French Revolution and culminated in the Napoleonic Wars. The first notice that a state of war existed reached the Government of the United States August 2, 1792, when the French Minister at Philadelphia, M. Jean Temant, informed Thomas Jefferson, the American Secretary of State, that the French Government had declared war against Hungary and Bohemia. The Secretary of State, in reply to this notice, assured the French Minister that the United States would remain friendly to France “and render all those good offices which shall be consistent with the duties of a neutral nation.” This expression of Mr. Jefferson seems to be the only direct acknowledgement by President Washington or his Cabinet that the United States had been placed in the position of a neutral state.

Much controversy has raged for a long period of time over the precise nature of what Wormser refers to as the “anatomy” of a corporation. Wormser himself defines a corporation as a “group of one or more persons authorized by sovereign authority to act as a unit and a personality in the eye of the law.” The definition indicates, on the one hand, that the act of incorporation creates a new person or entity, on the other that this new entity is in fact composite, made up of one or more pre-existing entities. The question arises, at what times will the court regard the corporate entity, and at what times will it look to the real persons who compose it ? A key to the solution of the problem is offered by Lord Mansfield. “A fiction of law shall never be contradicted so as to defeat the end for which it was invented, but for every other purpose it may be contradicted.” By the separate entity theory is meant that a corporation is to be regarded as an entity separate and apart from its corporators and that it is to be treated like any other independent person. That this is the theory of corporations generally accepted by the courts need hardly be proved. It will only be noted that the ruling English case on the subject is that of Salomon and Co. v. Salomon. In his opinion in that case Lord Halsbury said: “Once the company is legally incorporated it must be treated like any other independent person.”