In states which possess a written constitution and a constituent power, constitutional laws are, as early writers on international law expressed it, fundamental laws. In them is the source of the several governmental powers; they determine the form of the state, and of its organs and their functions, and they regulate the exercise of the legislative power. Briefly, they are the fundamental and the essential act of national sovereignty, the expression of the will of a self-organizing people.

Unlike other provinces detached from the Ottoman Empire and endowed with autonomy, the Island of Crete, for example, which the Powers furnished with a constitution prepared by themselves, Bulgaria received at Berlin the power to undertake the elaboration of its own constitution.

Section 2 of the organic act of the Department provided that every bill, order, resolution or vote of both houses of Congress which the President approved, or which he suffered to become effective without his approval, should be sent by the President to the Secretary of State; that every such document returned by him to Congress with his disapproval and then passed by a two-thirds vote should be sent by the Speaker of the House or the President of the Senate, according to which body it had originated in, to the Secretary of State; that he should as soon as possible cause it to be printed in at least three newspapers; should deliver one printed copy to each senator and representative; and should send two printed copies duly authenticated to the governors of all the States. He was to preserve the original laws carefully and cause them to be recorded in books.

A neutral state may at any time lay aside its neutrality and engage in war. This is recognized, though with a somewhat mediaeval flavor, by Macchiavelli in his counsel to the ideal prince, where he advises the latter never to remain neutral in a war between his neighbors, but to join with one side or the other, since by his aid that side would gain the victory and he could share in the spoil.

However unlikely it may be that such motives would bear weight to-day, it is nevertheless true that the right to make war at will exists in every sovereign state unless, by reason of international agreement, it is placed altogether outside of the realm of war and devoted to perpetual peace. The duties of simple, or self-imposed neutrality are now clearly recognized and quite generally observed. The neutral state must maintain exclusive jurisdiction and sovereignty over its land and territorial waters, and is bound as well to prevent within its borders all acts inconsistent with complete impartiality toward belligerents. It must, moreover, regulate the use of its harbors and coaling stations according to the recognized provisions of international law; it is bound to prevent the enlistment within its borders of troops destined for foreign service, and, finally, it is compelled to acquiesce in the penalties incurred by its subjects when engaged in the carriage of contraband goods, breach of blockade, or resistance to the belligerent rights of stoppage, visit and search.

As a characteristic of contemporary civilization, history will doubtless point to the unceasing effort to establish on a solid basis the juridical organization of the world. The essential requisites are already at hand. Facility of communication, suppression of distances, the fact that the different regions are in constant communication, all of these things greatly facilitate the work. There are no longer undiscovered lands, or inaccessible countries. In the commercial and industrial world business organizations embrace all the nations of the earth. In the intellectual domain, an irresistible international movement has succeeded the narrow conceptions heretofore existing. It is especially in the domain of law that such manifestations have been shown and are still shown with an ever-increasing intensity. In the vast subject of the conflict of laws, an effort is being made to obtain uniform rules; in the subject of the law of nations not only have numerous conventions been concluded, some of which number as contracting parties practically all the states; but the application of justice has been organized, and, already, has gone beyond the phase of arbitration; there exists a true judicial court, a court which declares and decides law in its own right instead of depending upon the will of those amenable to its jurisdiction. Everything indicates that the time is close at hand when a legislative and an executive power will be established over the nations; at any rate, no one nowadays thinks of pronouncing such institutions impossible and fit to be classed with unrealizable dreams.

Having considered in former numbers of this Journal the sometime and occasional duties of the Department, including among them certain contingent duties which it has never been called upon to perform, we may now advance to a consideration of its habitual functions.

The organic act of the Department prescribed that the Secretary of State should keep “ the seal of the United States.” It is the mark of the supreme authority of the United States, and before the government went into operation under the Constitution, was in the custody of the Secretary of Congress, being used to verify all important acts, whether executive or legislative; but the debate on executive departments in the first constitutional congress indicated that Congress did not contemplate keeping the seal any longer, and thought it would necessarily pass to the custody of the Executive. The President did, in fact, take it under his control as soon as he assumed office and before legal provision had been made for it.

The Hankow-Szechuan loan controversy, which has just been closed by the final ratification of the loan agreement, is typical of the numerous loan questions in China. In order to understand the meaning of the different phases of this controversy, two points must be borne in mind — that a foreign railway loan in China is entirely different from what it would be in the United States, and that the creditors in advancing their capital to China are induced by other than purely commercial motives. In the United States a railway loan is understood to be a commercial transaction between two parties, either private or public; in China it is regarded as a “ treaty ” between the Chinese Government and many other governments. No matter how a loan is made and who makes it, it invariably becomes mixed up with politics in the end. Loans are concluded only after much tedious diplomatic negotiations. Promises and “ undertakings,” which might have been made years before under exceptional circumstances, often play a more important part in determining the terms of the loan than the merits or demerits of the loan itself.

In his first annual message, December 8, 1829, President Andrew Jackson said :

Modern international law is generally regarded as beginning with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. But it is necessary to go much further back in the history of the world for the beginnings of the law governing the intercourse of nations. The Greek states had a rudimentary inter-state law that regulated their relations. Thus they practiced arbitration in a way among themselves: they recognized the sanctity of the person of heralds, and they followed other recognized customs in their dealings one with another. When Rome and Carthage and other nations were struggling for the mastery of the world, the beginnings of a law of nations were recognized and practiced between them. Upon, however, practically all the known world coming under the sway of imperial Rome, all possibility as well as need of a law of nations was wanting, and as a result the faltering beginnings of an international law as recognized among the Greek states and then by the Powers surrounding the Mediterranean, were extinguished by the extension of the Pax Romana to all the known world.

Eastern Europe is at the present moment in such a condition of unstable equilibrium and fermentation that it can not be known whether this abnormal state of affairs can end in peace or in war. The map of the East, so carefully prepared by the Congress of Berlin in 1878, is hardly more than a memory. The state of conventional law which resulted, having been decreed in an arbitrary manner, could only be artificial; and being sustained solely by the balancing of the forces of the Eastern States, it had to be modified according to circumstances, thus furnishing a new illustration of the importance of the harsh rule of interpretation of treaties known as the clause “ rebus sic stantibus.” The sudden happenings of 1908 have for their remote but certain cause the war in Manchuria, that grave political blunder of St. Petersburg. Held in check upon the Bosphorus by England, supplanted little by little at Constantinople by German influence, Russia, modifying the line of policy which she had constantly followed since the testament, spurious or genuine, but undoubtedly realistic of Peter the Great, thought to find in the extreme East an outlet for her political and territorial ambitions. There she disclosed her own military weakness rather than the strength of her adversary, and suffered the annihilation of her political influence in Europe. Even the Western balance of power was affected. France lost Morocco; and as for the Eastern balance of power, it no longer exists, and the kingdom of Servia has lost the reason for its existence. It is through the sudden displacement of the two sides of the scales into which Russia and Austria had thrown the weight of their swords that the Eastern upheaval was created.