The sixth year of the Permanent Court of International Justice has been busy and fruitful. The judges have been kept continuously at The Hague from the beginning of the twelfth(ordinary) session on June 15, 1927, to the end of the session on December 16, 1927. During the year the court has handed down four important orders, four judgments, and oneadvisory opinion. The following countries have been involved in cases or questions before the court during this period: Belgium, British Empire, China, Danzig, France, Germany Greece, Italy, Poland, Roumania, Turkey. The extent to which the court has been resortedto in six years is the best proof that it is filling a need in the international life ofour time. Whereas, in the course of its first six years, the Supreme Court of the Unite States handled but twelve cases, the Permanent Court of International Justice has now given eleven judgments and fourteen advisory opinions. Such a record seems to presage a useful rôle for the court in the future. It has now become so embedded in the world's treaty law that it would seem very difficult for the world ever again to be without it. In six years it has made significant contributions to our growing international jurisprudence, some of the most important of which have been made during the last twelve months.

The International Radiotelegraph Conference of Washington was opened on October 4, 1927, with an address by President Coolidge and was closed on November 25, 1927, with the signing of an International Radiotelegraph Convention and Annexed General Regulations by delegates representing 78 governments and a set of Annexed Supplementary Regulations by representatives of 75 governments. In his closing address, Secretary Hoover, president of the conference, referred to it as “ the largest international conference of history.”

The legal nature of property in mines has been the subject of much discussion, and varies, not only with the different systems of law, but also in different countries accepting the same legal system. In Roman law, the owner of the soil was theoretically considered to own all beneath the surface to the center of the earth, and all above it to the heavens, though there is considerable evidence that at one period of the Roman law the property in mines was separate from that of the surface. It is fairly certain, too, that the State was deemed to have an interest in mines and entitled to a portion of the profits.

As a result of the expansion of Western trade during the nineteenth century following the industrial revolution, Western nations, ever eager for the coveted trade of the Orient, and stimulated by the need of finding new markets for their accumulating exports, pushed their insistent way into the Far East with new determination. There followed a series of treaties with Eastern potentates opening up new trading areas and clothing Western merchants with extraterritorial rights roughly similar to those enjoyed by foreigners under the Turkish Capitulations. Thus was born in the Orient the régime of extraterritoriality which in three quarters of a century was destined to become the focus of increasing disturbance and unrest in the Far Eastern world.

Starting, as we must start, from the proposition, that in the international sphere, treaties are at any rate no less binding than are contracts in the municipal sphere, may we nevertheless agree that treaties become obsolete, and, if yes, when and in what conditions? Has Article 19 of the Covenant of the League in any way diminished the respect due to treaty obligations? These are questions, which have a special importance at a time when the world has recently been resettled by treaty, and it is worth while to give a little time to their examination. Such an examination may at least serve to clear our ideas, to suggest what are the limits of the doctrine, and to emphasize the necessity, if those limits are to be defined, of a resort to an international court of justice.

Revolutionary acts and preparations are liable to punishment by the criminal law of the community against which they are directed, and belong as such to the domain of municipal law. They become a matter of direct importance to international law when the menaced state finds that the efficacy of its laws and the possibilities of peaceful internal development are being frustrated by revolutionary propaganda or by acts of rebellion coming from abroad. Such acts may, when brought to consummation within its territory, be punished with all the rigor of the law. But the probability of their suppression is diminished and the chances of their success are enhanced as a result of their being hatched out and prepared under cover of the territorial supremacy of another state. It happens thus that what one state believes to be its internationally recognized right of peaceful existence is put in danger in consequence of another state’s right to exclusive jurisdiction over its territory, a right, in turn, fully protected by international law.