ARTICLE VIII Amendments This Constitution may be amended at any annual or special meeting of the Society by a majority vote of the members present and voting. But all amendments to be proposed at any meeting shall first be referred to the Executive Council for consideration and shall be submitted to the members of the Society at least ten days before such meeting. AMENDMENTS Article IV is hereby amended by inserting after the words "The officers of the Society shall consist of a President," the words "an Honorary President." Article II Article III is hereby amended by striking out the word "publications" in the third line of paragraph two, and inserting in lieu thereof the words "American Journal of International Law." Article III Article IV is hereby amended by omitting the words in brackets and inserting the words in italics: The officers of the Society shall consist of a President, an Honorary President, nine or more Vice-Presidents, the number to be fixed from time to time by the Executive Council, a Recording Secretary, a Corresponding Secretary, and a Treasurer, who shall be elected annually, and of an Executive Council composed of the [President, the Vice-Presidents] foregoing officers, ex officio, and twenty-four elected members, whose terms of office shall be three years, except that of those elected at the first election, eight shall serve for the period of one year only and eight for the period of two years, and that any one elected to fill a vacancy shall serve only for the unexpired term of the member in whose place he is chosen. No elected member of the Executive Council shall be eligible for reelection until the next annual meeting after that at which his term of office expires. The Recording Secretary, the Corresponding Secretary, and the Treasurer shall be elected by the Executive Council [from among its members]. The other officers of the Society shall be elected by the Society, except as hereinafter provided for the filling of vacancies occurring between elections. 'This amendment was adopted at the business meeting held April 24, 1909. SIXTEENTH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF INTERNATIONAL LAW THE WASHINGTON HOTEL, WASHINGTON, D. C. APRIL 27-29, 1922 FIRST SESSION Thursday, April 27, 1922, 8.30 o'clock, p.m. The Society was called to order at 8.30 o'clock, by the Honorable ELIHU ROOT, President. The PRESIDENT. Ladies and gentlemen: During the first fifteen years of this Society it was the custom of the President to review the principal occurrences in the field of international law which had transpired during the preceding year, and to follow with a somewhat formal address. I confess myself unable to follow that process tonight. Events have been too tempestuous, and international affairs have been too largely outside of the field of international law. I shall proceed immediately, therefore, to some observations upon the part played by international law in the recent Conference for the Limitation of Armament in Washington. INTERNATIONAL LAW AT THE ARMS CONFERENCE President of the Society The business of the recent Washington Conference on Limitation of Armament was to reach agreements which would bind the parties by contractural obligation, as distinguished from the obligations imposed by law. The agreements reached, whether expressed in treaties or in formal declarations, are not complicated and are easily understood. In two fields, however, the subjects treated were so far affected by rules of international law that to understand the full meaning and purpose of the provisions agreed upon, and the reasons why they received their present form, it seems desirable to consider the law in the light of which the agreements are to be read. One of these fields is covered by the treaties and resolutions relating to China and the formal declarations relating to Siberia. The other field is covered by the treaty and resolutions regarding submarines and other new agencies of warfare. In the first instance, let me state the general nature of the Conference work as a whole. The Conference was called to deal with the limitation of armament. The special occasion for it was the apparent race of competition in the building of battleships and battle-cruisers on the part of Japan and the United States, a race in which Great Britain was about to enter under the imperative necessity of maintaining her ocean-borne food supply and protecting her Far Eastern colonies and dominions. The original parties proposed were the five great naval Powers, actual or potential,-Great Britain, France, Italy, Japan and the United States. The condition of affairs in the continent of Europe made it plain very early that it would be impossible at that time and in that way to deal effectively with the subject of land armament, so that the work of the Conference was confined to its primary purpose of stopping the race of naval construction and limiting naval armament. At the outset of the Conference the United States made a very drastic proposal not only to stop competition, but to destroy about forty per cent. of the existing strength of capital ships of the principal naval Powers, in such a way as to leave the relative proportions of naval strength unchanged, and that proposal was ultimately accepted and embodied in the principal treaty resulting from the Conference. Such proposals, however, do not carry themselves. Competition in armament results from national states of mind, distrust, apprehension of attack, a widespread belief that war is imminent, so that the peoples of the respective countries think in terms of war, prepare for war and reach a condition of thought and feeling in which it is natural for war to come. That state of mind must be disposed of if competition is to be really stopped. The nations concerned must cease to think in terms of war and must come to think in terms of peace. The object of having a conference is to effect such a change by friendly negotiation, explanation, doing away with misunderstanding, creating conviction of friendly intention and good faith, with the aid on appropriate occasions of friendly advice of third parties. The success of such a process in the Washington Conference was registered in what is called the Four Power Treaty between Great Britain, France, Japan and the United States. I doubt if any formal treaty ever accomplished so much by doing so little. It provided that we should all respect rights, which we were bound to do already, and that if controversy arose about the Pacific islands (it was quite immaterial what islands), the parties should get together and talk it over, which was the very thing they were then doing in Washington. The consent of the Senate was not necessary to such an agreement. It merely arranged for following an ordinary form of diplomatic intercourse. The President had done the same thing at Algeciras and at The Hague and at the Conference of London without asking the consent of the Senate, and the Senate had ratified the conclu sions reached at those conferences. It was important, however, that the Senate should give its approval in this case because the instrument was a formal certificate to all the people of Japan and all the people of the United States and all the civilized Powers that the parties to the treaty had abandoned their mutual distrust and had ceased to think about war with each other and had resumed relations of genuine friendship. That certificate and the truth that it represents incidentally made possible the abandonment of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and made possible the treaty for the limitation of naval armament and dispelled one war cloud upon the horizon of a troubled world. The Four Power Treaty was not enough, however, standing by itself, to make the new condition stable without some treatment of the causes of irritation which had arisen and which might be apprehended upon the continent of Asia. For the discussion of this subject, four other Powers having interests in the Far East,-Belgium, China, The Netherlands and Portugal, -also took part. These causes of irritation were incident to the contacts of western civilization with the peculiar and widely different civilization of China. The character of the Chinese people commands admiration, respect and sympathy. It was a product of the life of a self-contained agricultural community occupying a vast territory and content with the conditions of peace and industry within their own limits. It was little adapted, however, to resist the thrust of western enterprise ranging the world for trade and the development of wealth. The report to the President by the American Delegation in the Conference described this aspect of Chinese civilization in these words: The people of China are the inheritors of the oldest extant civilization of the world; but it is a civilization which has followed a course of development different from that of the West. It has almost wholly ignored the material, the mechanical, the scientific, and industrial mastery of natural resources, which has so characterized our Western civilization in its later growth, and has led among us to the creation of an intricate industrial system. The spirit of Chinese civilization has, moreover, been pacific, and lacking in the consciousness of nationality as we understand that term. In its political aspects, the ideal of that civilization was to follow the principle of self-government by the family or guild to an extreme. The throne had imposed upon the people virtually no authority and exercised virtually no functions save to preserve order and to collect taxes for the maintenance of the throne as a symbol of national or racial unity. China, with its age-long devotion to a political ideal which scarcely involved the concept of a state, and which had afforded its people no experience of coordinated action for political ends, was slower to adapt itself to conditions arising out of what it regarded as the intrusion of the West. Even after it had ceased actually to oppose this intrusion, |