Without belittling other functions of the United Nations one must acknowledge that it is hardly capable of taking coercive action in the event of a breach of the peace or of an act of aggression. The United Nations cannot guarantee collective security against aggression, because any permanent member of the Security Council may prevent, by its single veto, the application of sanctions against itself or any other state guilty of aggression. This important gap in the Charter has been filled in by agreements negotiated outside the Organization. The process of negotiating such agreements is not completed, certain areas of the world not being as yet covered by the existing treaties of mutual assistance, but the main lines have already been traced with sufficient clarity.

It is the unalterable fate and the inevitable risk of any debt that its value is closely connected with the fate and actions of the debtor whose assets are subject to the liability. This applies especially to the public debts of a belligerent state whose wealth and resources, and sometimes its very existence, are at stake. The domestic laws of almost every civilized country protect the creditor against the effects of legal changes and of non-remunerative mutations affecting all or an important portion of the property subject to the liability. This liability remains with the transferred property. To a certain extent it is legally vested in the person who succeeds to the property rights.

In an address before the 1949 annual meeting of the American Society of International Law this writer remarked that the laws governing captured enemy property have never been codified or collected in one place and are very difficult to find and apply. The lack of a handy tool in the field of captured property has been noted at times by others, including Professor H. A. Smith, formerly a colonel with the British 21st Army Group, who observed that the “law of booty is almost unwritten” and Judge Manley O. Hudson, who wrote some years ago in an editorial in this JOURNAL that the “literature on captured property and war booty seemed inadequate.”

One function of the British Foreign Office has been to promote the universal abolition of slavery, the slave trade, and analogous forms of involuntary servitude. It has been said that “International co-operation for the suppression of the African slave trade was one of the most significant developments of the nineteenth century.” If this is so, it should not be a superfluous task to consider the legal aspects of the principal methods which the prime mover, Great Britain, employed to achieve this effect. The literature of international law contains excellent material on certain features of the problem, but little material on the most productive and decisive phases of the policy. The object of this article is to show what those phases were, without dealing with their political side any more than seems absolutely necessary for clarity.