Huig de Groot, whom we know and venerate under the Latinized name of Hugo Grotius, is not a man with one book to his credit; but lawyers of all parts of the world are celebrating the three hundredth anniversary of one work of his, De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres. It appeared, it would seem, sometime in the month of March, 1625. For many years it was looked upon as a tour deforce, as an extraordinary achievement for a politician in exile and a humanist to his finger-tips to have turned off within the space of a few months a treatise on a dry and admittedly technical subject, whose principles were ill-defined and, where known, were treated with scant respect.

The third item on the first list of subject-matters taken up for further consideration by the League of Nations Committee of Experts for the Progressive Codification of International Law (Geneva, April 8,1925) reads: "Diplomatic privileges and immunities." It is to be hoped and expected that the committee, in considering a problem as old as international law itself, will not feel satisfied with clinging to conceptions and solutions of by-gone centuries, but will endeavor to give them, within the frame-work of post-war international law, a new stamp.

The first two paragraphs of Article 5 of the Covenant of the League of Nations provide:

All matters of procedure at meetings of the Assembly or of the Council, including the appointment of committees to investigate particular matters, shall be regulated by the Assembly or by the Council and may be decided by a majority of the members of the League represented at the meeting.

The growth of the treaty-making power in Canada is a very interesting subject, but any attempt to state in a legal way the source of this power or to give a clear, juridicial analysis of the international and inter-Empire status of Canada is extremely difficult.

Mr. J. Holmes had told us that the object of the study of law is to make the prophecies of precedent more precise, to generalize them into a thoroughly connected system; that that object is “the prediction of the incidence of the public force through the instrumentalities of courts.” The framers of our constitutional jurisprudence were clearly concerned with the incidence of just principles upon governmental powers. Kent declares that when the United States ceased to be a part of the British Empire, and assumed the character of an independent nation, they became subject to that system of rules, which reason, morality and custom had established among the civilized nations of Europe, as their public law. It was recognized that the law of nations prescribed “what one nation may do without giving just cause for war, and what of consequence, another may or ought to permit without being considered as having sacrificed its honor, its dignity, or its independence.” Story avers that the general law of nations is “equally obligatory upon all sovereigns and all states." It is "the umpire and security of their rights and peace,” declared Jefferson. It is a law which “binds all nations,” declared the Supreme Court of the United States in 1794.

The Supreme Court of the United States is now bringing to a close a case which has occupied its attention for five years, involving the boundary along the Red River between Oklahoma and Texas. The principles of law applied by the court were not new, but the facts to which they were applied were complicated and interesting, both from historical and legal points of view, and when taken in connection with the warmth of popular feeling along the boundary, are perhaps worth recording in this JOURNAL, since they could easily have given rise to actual warfare had the contesting sovereignties been independent nations instead of members of the United States of America.