Many of the foremost jurisconsults of the world, representing many nations, have in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries stated that Hudson Bay, a great North American sea, is a part of the open sea, and consequently free to the vessels of all nations for the purposes of navigation and fishing. This seems to have been a generally accepted doctrine until the close of the nineteenth century. Within recent years, however, the Dominion of Canada has set up the claim that all American vessels that enter Hudson Bay to catch fish or hunt whales must pay a license. The maintenance of such a policy would be tantamount to making of Hudson Bay a closed sea (mare clausum).

The highest duty of an American diplomatic or consular officer is to protect citizens of the United States in lawful pursuit of their affairs in foreign countries. The document issued in authentication of the right to such protection is the passport.

Broadly speaking, the Department issues two kinds of passports — those for citizens and those for persons who are not citizens. Citizens’ passports are ordinary and special; aliens’ passports are for travel in the United States and for qualified protection abroad of those who have taken the first steps to become American citizens.

The citizen’s passport is the only document issued by the Department of State to authenticate the citizenship of an American going abroad. The Act of August 18, 1856, makes the issuance to one who is not a citizen a penal offense if it is committed by a consular officer. Before this law was passed the Department did not issue the document to aliens; but it was permitted to this government’s agents abroad sometimes to issue it to others than American citizens. The Personal Instructions to the Diplomatic Agents of the United States of 1853 said:

One of the earliest mitigations of the horrors of war, particularly in its incidence upon private individuals, was the custom of sparing the inhabitants of a surrendered city in their persons and property, instead of subjecting them to the rapine and pillage which usually followed a capture by storm. Even the Mosaic Code made this exception in the midst of its barbarities, although the doomed cities of Canaan were excluded from the benefits of the exception. Both the general savagery and the one humane departure from it are well exemplified by verses ten to sixteen of the twentieth chapter of Deuteronomy:

1. 10. When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it.

2. 11. And it shall be, if it make thee answer of peace, and open unto thee,,then it shall be, that all the people that is found therein shall be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee.

3. 12. And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it.

4. 13. And when the Lord thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword;

5. 14. But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the Lord thy God hath given thee.

6. 15. Thus shalt thou do unto all the cities which are very far off from thee, which are not of the cities of these nations.

7. 16. But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth.

In the middle ages rivers which separated alien peoples or tribes were looked upon as neutral barriers rather than areas susceptible of nice division and capable of ownership. There gradually arose, however, a sense of the necessity for the assertion of control over such waters; but there was confusion of thought as to the nature and extent of that control. Rivers served as natural arteries of commerce as well as natural boundaries. The matter of navigation was of as great moment as that of territorial limits. For that reason, early writers announced the principle of co-dominion, which assigned to the opposite riparian proprietors rights of sovereignty over the entire stream. Men found it difficult to reconcile the claim of exclusive sovereignty asserted by one state over any portion of the stream, with the claim of another to exercise rights of navigation therein. No doubt the latter claim had a marked effect upon the scope of the former. Nevertheless, rights of navigation were not decisive of the problem whether a line of division might be drawn through the waters of a river in recognition of exclusive sovereign rights of the states on either side thereof. It came to be understood that such a line could be drawn. In accordance with the views of Grotius and Vattel, nations were agreed that it should pass through the middle of the stream. This method of division proved, however, to be unsatisfactory in the case of navigable rivers; for, in disregarding the course of the principal channel, it was likewise heedless of the equities of the state that happened to be the more remote therefrom. Nor did it adapt itself to gradual changes which such channel might undergo. As a result, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, riparian states began to conclude treaties which proposed a different method of division and which has since become the accepted mode of indicating the frontier.

From the foregoing explanations, it will be seen that in the Turko-Bulgarian arrangement relative to the question of independence, less care was taken in regulating according to juridical principles the transmission of the attributes of sovereignty than in an effort to reach a financial compromise capable of conciliating opposing interests. We have in particular considered the property of the public domain as a real property for which the emancipated State must refund the accumulated outlay. This is a curious idea for our times, when we have lost the habit of looking at the public power in the light of patrimoniality. But this conception is self-explanatory, if we but remember that we are in the Orient, in Turkish territory where the coining of the attributes of sovereignty has always been the rule, where the principles of the Middle Ages have survived longer than anywhere else. And these conditions are self-explaining if we think of the persisting uncertainty of the nature and the real meaning both of the Treaty of Berlin and of the union of 1885 regarding Bulgaria and Rumeiia. From all these conditions, there issues an impression of indecision and of archaism.

The library of the Department was founded by Thomas Jefferson. In his estimates of expenses of June 17, 1790, he included subscriptions to fifteen American newspapers at an average of four dollars per year for each; $200 to begin a collection of the laws of the States, and twenty-five dollars for the purchase of foreign gazettes, this amount including also payment for American papers to be sent to our agents abroad. To this basis for a library should be added the laws and public documents deposited with the Department under various statutes, and books under the copyright law.

It was inevitable that some works on government and international law should find their way into an office occupied by such men of books as Jefferson and Madison. When the British invaded the city in 1814, no attempt was made to save the library and it was burned with the Department building. The work of collecting was taken up again as soon as the office was reestablished. The Department was dependent upon its own library resources and did not have the privilege of drawing books from the Library of Congress, until it was granted by law January 30, 1830; but probably it had the larger collection of the two. By 1831 the documents and laws had become so numerous that Congress appropriated $340 to pay for their storage.

We considered in a former number of the Journal the chief publications of the Department. The President’s annual message to Congress usually contains a statement of our relations with foreign Powers, and this serves as the annual report of the Secretary of State. A regular annual report to the President or Congress is required from the heads of other departments but not from him. When Richard Olney was Secretary, however, he made a report dated December, 1896, entitled “Report of the Secretary of State” for that year. It was intended to be the first annual report, but the example was not followed.

The management of foreign affairs being the most important of the regular duties of the Department, the supervision of the diplomatic and consular service are its chief duties. The general rules which govern the foreign service are found in the works on international law and particularly in the American digests; but two special publications have been issued by the Department of State for the guidance of its agents abroad — the Diplomatic Instructions and the Consular Regulations.