The International Conference of American States on Conciliation and Arbitration, which met in Washington from December 10, 1928, to January 5, 1929, was characterized by one of the delegates to the conference as the Locarno of the New World. Shortly after the signing of the General Pact for the Renunciation of War, we find the nations of the Western Hemisphere taking the logical next step of providing machinery for the pacific settlement of all international disputes. “ It is quite obvious that it is not sufficient to renounce war, unless we are ready to have recourse to the processes of peace.” Here is concrete evidence of the good faith of the American Republics to provide a clean-cut substitute for war as an instrument of national policy. The necessity for the development of machinery for international pacific settlement has been demonstrated to the present generation by the fact that the whole nature of the institution of war changed whenman became a scientist, an engineer, and a mechanic. Mass production, under the stimulus of intensive research, has madepossible the production of instruments of destruction which threaten to destroy civilization, unless international social relations can be brought within the control of law. While President-elect Hoover was making his good-will, personal-relations tour in South America, eminent jurists from twenty of the American Republics were meeting in Washington to set up the framework for the stabilization of international relations.

The first telegraph had been in operation only a short time when a code was made available to the users of the new instrument. From that time to the present, codes for use in electrical communications have appeared in ever-increasing number. Two principal objects have been sought and achieved by their use: secrecy and economy. To the business man, the second of these objects is paramount; and code-makers have constantly endeavored to express an increasing amount of information in a given number of letters.

In 1900, by the opening of the Chicago drainage canal, there was provided a watercourse for the disposal of sewage and for navigation from Lake Michigan by way of the Chicago River to the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers. Entailing as it did the reversal of the flow of the Chicago River, this, from the engineering standpoint, has been hailed as a great achievement. The large abstraction of water from Lake Michigan through the canal, however, had its effect in a lowering of levels in the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River with consequent injury to navigation. This brought about constant opposition to the canal from the Federal Government and from Canada. Thus the Sanitary District of Chicago has been involved in a host of legal difficulties and put to much expense in adjusting its plant to the demands of the United States Government. The diversion in the meantime has been a constant source of ill-feeling towards the United States on the part of Canada and at present, although under federal control, offers an obstacle to the further development of Great Lakes and St. Lawrence waterways.

The following incident will explain the reason for the suggestions in this paper that treaties signed on behalf of the United States should be published, in some cases, before their ratification.

It is now more than a decade since the Soviet Government took over control of the Russian state. During that period the government has had to face and has attempted to solve, interms compatible with its special ideology, the problem of permanent adjustment to a world with radically divergent conceptions of the legal order. How that international adjustment has thus far been made becomes a question of genuine importance, for, in proportion as it has materialized in treaty form,it has thrown new light on the major problem of regional and international security. In the ensuing pages the foundations, buttresses and super structure of a system of security as conceived in Moscow will be dealt with, and the relation they bear to the rivalsystems of Geneva and Washington considered. It is believed that the polices of the Kreml in have developed, in a decade, on the basis of positive treaty law, the broad framework of a system of security having far-reaching legal significance.

The sinking on the high seas of the Canadian registered schooner I’m Alone as a suspected rum runner resisting boarding for enquiry (visit and search) by the United States Coast Guard patrol boat Dexter after a two days chase from a point a short distance off the coast of Louisiana, has given rise to considerable discussion in the press of the United States and Great Britain, and suggests several interesting questions of international law and treaty construction.