More than thirteen decades after Chile annexed Bolivia's coastal regions, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) denied Bolivia's longstanding claim that Chile had undertaken a legal obligation to negotiate granting it sovereign access to the Pacific Ocean.

The Russo-Mongolian Agreement of November 3, 1912, with its protocol; the Russo-Chinese Declaration of November 5, 1913, with the notes exchanged on that date; the Russo-Mongolian Railway Agreement of September 30, 1914, and the Tripartite Agreement between China, Russia, and Mongolia signed on June 7, 1915, together with the declaration of China and Russia, accompanying this last-mentioned document, are all printed in the Supplement to this number of the Journal and are deserving of more than a passing notice, for they undertake to define the relations of three great nations and recall historic events of considerable importance.

Since 1945 the number of nations possessing nuclear weapons has increased five times and stockpiles of nuclear weapons have increased thousands of times. The enormity of the build-up of capabilities for nuclear destruction has largely overshadowed the remarkable progress that has been made since 1945 in developing the peaceful applications of nuclear science. The take-off point for the economic use of nuclear fuels for generating electricity appears to have now been reached.

When the thirteen colonies became a nation and formed the Constitution of the United States of America, their population was chiefly on the Atlantic seaboard. Their ships sailed to every port of the civilized world. They were alive to the importance of foreign commerce. The wars of the Napoleonic epoch and the controversies to which they gave rise, led the American people to feel that it was for their interest, not only to abstain from entangling alliances with the powers of continental Europe, but to limit their activities as far as possible to their own territory. The acquisition of Louisiana from the French in 1803 gave to the United States a fertile and almost boundless domain and afforded an opening for national growth, which of itself tended to withdraw the thought and enterprise of our people from foreign business. Undoubtedly our foreign commerce did increase down to the time of the Civil War, but it did not keep pace with the development of ^he country or with the growth of interstate commerce. Since the Civil War, however, the current has turned. The wealth of the United States has enormously increased. Its capital is found invested in foreign countries, and it has acquired territorial possessions not only in the Atlantic, but in the Pacific, which have changed entirely the attitude of the American people. It must inevitably be the case that in the future the number of American citizens who go to foreign countries and take up a residence there will far exceed that of any other period of our history. A few of these no doubt will become citizens of the countries to which they go, but experience shows that the great majority both of English and American citizens who reside in foreign countries still retain their citizenship. The relation borne by the home government to these citizens domiciled abroad is, therefore, a matter of great and increasing importance.