Intensive campaigns of hostile and subversive propaganda against the territorial integrity and political order of foreign states have constituted one of the most disturbing factors in the international life of the postwar period. Powerful groups, frequently with governmental toleration or support, clamor for the incorporation in their several states of territories inhabited by populations of like nationality. Vigorous and systematic incitement of foreign subjects to disaffection or revolt against their own governments is the method generally adopted to attain this end. The consequent state of tension in the relations of the states concerned presents a real and actual threat to international peace. The dangerous situations which always result from a lack of coincidence between national and political frontiers have been intensified by the rise in several states of dictatorial régimes, which are disposed to press with special vigor their territorial claims. Hostile propaganda, especially if carried on with the sanction of nationalistic governments, “inevitably results in what might be termed the obliteration of the border-line between the state of peace and the state of war.” It tends always to create an atmosphere conducive to the occurrence of those “incidents” which have so frequently led to major conflicts.

Though representatives of the United States participated very actively in the drafting of the Constitution of the International Labor Organization in 1919, and though the first International Labor Conference was held in Washington under the presidency of the Secretary of Labor, the Government of the United States had no part in the work of the International Labor Organization during its first fifteen years. In consequence, the United States has hitherto held aloof from one of the most significant of the modern developments of international law. Fortunately, this situation has now been changed. On August 20,1934, the United States became the fifty-ninth member of the International Labor Organization. The steps by which this result has been achieved, and the problems growing out of it, present some interesting legal questions which ought not to escape attention.

Henry Adams said in his Life of Gallatin that of all the portions of our national history, “none is more often or more carefully discussed than Jay’s Treaty.” All general histories and biographies of the period contain ample references to the treaty and the controversies over it. The same is true of many contemporary letters and memoirs. Several monographs of merit have been published concerning the treaty, the most complete dealing with the treaty negotiations, by Dr. Samuel Flagg Bemis. Judge John Bassett Moore has recently brought out seven valuable volumes dealing with the arbitrations which resulted from the treaty.

The conventional law regarding fishing rights has had a long and complicated development. Beginning before the concepts of international law as we know them were at all defined, it has played its part in shaping that law and in influencing its development. Many of the earliest fishing treaties were concerned with insuring freedom from molestation while fishing. From that time when the sea was a place of “war of everyone against everyone” the conventional law regarding fishing rights passed through the period of the struggle between the rival claims of mare clausum and mare liberum and played a part in the solution of that controversy. It likewise has been significant in the development of the idea of territorial waters as we know it today. It has helped determine both the limits assigned to and the rights enjoyed within those limits. In any future development of maritime law it will undoubtedly play its part.