The mission for which I have the honor to speak is charged by the Government and the people of the United States of America with a message to the Government and the people of Russia.

The mission comes from a democratic republic. Its members are commissioned and instructed by a President who holds his high office as Chief Executive of more than one hundred million free people, by virtue of a popular election in which more than eighteen million votes were freely cast and fairly counted, pursuant to law, by universal, equal, direct and secret suffrage.

Just previous to the outbreak of the European War there was an international conference in session at Christiania in Norway which was charged with the solution of. a problem unique from an international standpoint. It arose from the extraordinary political situation of the archipelago of Spitzbergen lying about four hundred miles north of the Norwegian coast.

In May, 1915, there assembled at Washington, on the invitation of the President of the United States, the First Pan American Financial Conference. It was attended by delegates from eighteen American Republics, and by leaders in industry and finance in the United States. The presiding officer was the Secretary, of the Treasury of the United States.

Germany is preparing to rehabilitate her industry and commerce after the war shall end and the entire world is interested in knowing what plans for rehabilitation she will adopt. There are two types of commercial policy which have opposite effects on the countries immediately involved and on the remainder of the world.

Gradually there has developed a system of treaty negotiation which eliminates all possibility of bad faith in contracting, unless the mala fides is both deliberate and long-lived. Modern treaty technique accounts for this, the stages of a treaty from negotiation to entry into force having been developed to serve th|s very end. When kings alone ruled in the brave days of old, only signatures, bolstered up on occasion by oaths, giving of hostages, etc., were employed to give faith to such documents.

The United States, fighting a war for independence from the greatest of maritime Powers at a time when the belligerent and neutral worlds were united against England because of her maintenance of the ancient rules of maritime warfare, naturally incorporated into its first treaty, the commercial agreement of 1778 with France, the "twin maxims" of Utrecht: free ships, free goods, enemy ships, enemy goods. The greater freedom which the first of these principles expressed agreed with the interests and the temper of the new republic, since in but one of its subsequent treaties has it included the opposing regulations upheld by the mother country. Treaties of 1782 with the United Provinces, 1783 with Sweden, and 1800 with France stipulated that free ships should make free goods and enemy ships, enemy goods.