The current international situation did not permit the Permanent Court of International Justice to resume its activities during the year 1942. Two cases are still pending before the court—the case relating to the Electricity Company of Sofia and Bulgaria and the Gerliczy Case—but no action was taken by the parties in either of them during the year. Nor was there the usual activity in connection with instruments relating to the court.

Naval fleets are maintained by development and replacement because their possessors dare not fail to make provision for a maritime war in which they may be participants. No means yet devised and accepted for the amicable adjustment of international differences have removed from responsible statesmen a sense of the necessity of anticipating such a contingency. Despite increasing efforts in every quarter to cultivate wills for peace and abhorrence of armed conflict, as well as a desire to adjust grave differences by judicial process or through commissions of conciliation, war is still regarded as a contingency which must be reckoned with, and as one which is as dangerous as it is seemingly remote. In making provision as against a contingency which none would welcome or hasten, the governments of maritime states do not necessarily encourage war or indicate approval of recourse to it. A particular conference of maritime states may in fact uplift the hopes of prospective belligerents which resent and oppose agreements restricting recourse to measures and instrumentalities on which they expect to rely. On the other hand, general arrangements respecting belligerent activities may serve to lessen a zeal for war and to remove its very approach further from the horizon. Everything depends upon the ambitions of the states which consent to confer. The point to be observed is that agreements for the regulation of maritime war in so far as they purport to proscribe or check the use of particular instrumentalities or recourse to particular measures, are not to be deemed bellicose in design or effect. Such regulatory agreements are advocates of peace rather than of war. Moreover, as will be seen, they may be the means of encouraging states to reduce armaments which would otherwise be maintained.

The international implications of the money phenomenon were to some extent perceived as early as the time of some of the scholastics who found in the universal use of money an instance of the operation of the Law of Nations (jus gentium). The latter term, it is true, was employed by the scholastics rather ambiguously, covering also rules observed by all or most nations in domestic relations. A later writer of the seventeenth century, Samuel Rachel, went further. In his Dissertations on the Laws of Nature and of Nations (1676) he advances the idea that the international circulation of many coins—he mentions especially the Turkish Ducats—proves the existence of a Law of Nations in the modern sense of a law governing the relations among independent states.

The outstanding accomplishment of the Lima Conference was without doubt the Declaration of the Principles of the Solidarity of America, known more briefly as the Declaration of Lima. Its formulation was not brought about by discussions in the committee to which problems relating to the “Organization of Peace” were entrusted, but was rather the outcome of informal and in part confidential conversations among the heads of the several delegations. Numerous drafts were submitted in the process of reconciling conflicting views. Compromises were made by delegates with more advanced views in order to secure the assent of those taking a more conservative position. The requisite of unanimity not only delayed the final adoption of an acceptable text, but of necessity introduced elements of confusion in the logical order of the Declaration and of inconsistency in the relations of its several parts. Nevertheless the final result was a document of far-reaching importance in the progress of international law within the western hemisphere; and the agreement which it embodies must for the time rank as the most significant statement of principles and pledge of concerted action in the history of Latin American conferences.