On Monday evening, April 18, 1927, his Excellency Octavio Mangabeira, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Brazil, formally opened the International Commission of American Jurists for the Codification of International Law, Public and Private, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, in the Monroe Palace, in the presence of the official representatives of seventeen of the twenty-one American Republics, having before them, as the bases of their labors,the projects of public and private international law drafted by the American Institute of International Law. On Friday afternoon, May 20, 1927, he formally adjourned the International Commission of American Jurists, which had to its credit twelve projects of public international law, and a code of private international law of no less than 439 articles, which the Commission had, within the short space of five weeks, put into shape primarily from the projects of the American Institute of International Law. It is the purpose of the present article to show how this Commission, the first official body which successfully and consciously endeavored to codify the two branches of international law, accomplished the purpose for which it had been created and assembled.

The United States of America, having refused to ratify the peace treaty negotiated at Paris in 1919 between the Allied and Associated Powers, on the one hand, and Germany on the other hand, commonly called the Treaty of Versailles, has, nevertheless, reserved to itself all the rights arising from the said treaty in the separate treaty of peace which was concluded between the United States of America and Germany on August 25, 1921, and ratified at Berlin on November 11, 1921, the treaty having been promulgated by the President of the United States on November 14, 1921. The clause containing the said reservation of rights reads that

At the Imperial Conference of 1926, the participating British governments agreed that the Dominions and Great Britain “ are autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations”

The scope of activities covered by the rules of unneutral service is much more limited than one might casually suppose from the term itself. As determined by practice, the activities included are only those of privately owned vessels, committed in such a way as to afford actual assistance to a belligerent force, and of such a nature as to constitute a hostile action for which the agent might be found responsible.