If one looks back over the two hundred years of thinking and practice on the codification of international law which separate Jeremy Bentham from the new draft convention on State succession, one is struck by the fact that the ideas become less and less ambitious and more and more cautious, pragmatic and technical. It is true that up to the beginning of the present century learned codes with hundreds of articles were still being produced. But even then the Institut de droit international and the International Law Association had already started work on more specialized projects. The first official codification work under the League of Nations similarly concentrated on selected topics, and this was quite apart from the specialized conventions produced by the International Labour Organization. The codification of the law of international conflict had, of course, already been accomplished in The Hague at the turn of the century.