for the settlement of such questions. Present indications point to the adoption in some form or other of the doctrine of the plebiscite, though this, too, has its difficulties, especially in dealing with mixed populations and undeveloped races. But it is essential to understand that unless some common principles of decision are agreed upon by the civilized world, these grave political controversies cannot be judicially settled at all (pp. 57, 58).

The far-flung issues presented in Kansas v. Colorado are deservedly made the subject of particular consideration. The author regards that case as making rules for itself as it went along.

It illustrates the difficulty with which an international court must frequently be faced of having no accepted rule of law applicable to the particular dispute. The laws of the two States upon the subject-matter of the controversy were in sharp conflict, and there was no rule of superior authority binding upon both parties. It is by no means satisfactory for litigants to have their dispute settled according to a rule manufactured by the court to meet the particular emergency. The actual decision reached was in the nature of a compromise, as is often the case in international arbitrations (p. 88).

The author closes, as he began, by recognizing the coexistence of the sovereignty of each American State, and that of the United States, but treats this as really a legal fiction (p. 110).

Opposition to the Court appears from time to time in American politics, but such opposition no longer follows State lines, and is not based upon any theory of State rights. The lesson of this for our own day would appear to be that the strength of any international court will be in inverse proportion to the strength of national feeling in the States composing the League. No statesman of any country would suggest to-day that the nations of the world should surrender to any league powers anything like so great as those committed to the Federal Government by the Constitution of the United States. . . . It is neither possible nor desirable to fuse the existing civilized States of the world into a single nation and any international tribunal will have to deal with States in which sovereignty is not merely a legal formula, but a political fact (pp. 110, 111).

The practical lessons which are to be drawn from a study of the work of the Supreme Court of the United States are summarized thus:

1. "Certain cases in which the existence, the honor, or the most vital interests of the nations are involved, can only be settled by agreement or, in the last resort, by war."

2. "A permanent international tribunal, constructed on sound principles, will lead in the course of time to the growth of an international practice of submitting controversies to judicial decision."

3. The enforcement of international judgments must be clearly provided for.

4. "The judgments of an international tribunal will not command general assent unless it administers a definite and written system of international law drawn up by the agreement of all the States which become members of the League" (pp. 119, 120).

SIMEON E. BALDWIN.

Geschichte des Völkerbundgedankens in Deutschland. By Veit Valentin. Berlin: Hans Robert Engelmann. 1920. pp. vi, 170.

The author has assembled a mass of material bearing upon international peace and world organization, from writings during the past two centuries of German philosophers, historians, and publicists. He has analyzed and compared the material, and he has described the environment, personal and historical, under which these contributions came to be written. The dénouement leads the author to contemplate the wide discrepancy between the quantity of energy expended in Germany in the cause of peace and the sterility of achievement with the official classes and the reigning dynasty. He therefore seeks to explain this result which, to borrow a recent title, might have been designated quite properly, at least from a German viewpoint, "the greatest failure in all history." Let the author speak. He is referring to the period of the Hague Conferences.

...

Official and Imperial Germany was cold toward the idea of a community of states. Official Germany unfortunately failed to observe that for more than a generation something new had developed in the great world. The spirit of the French Revolution had entered into a spiritual marriage with Anglo-Saxon Puritanism from which issued political doctrines of tremendous attraction. Nothing less than a second epoch of enlightenment had developed, having many characteristics, both of strength and weakness, of the movement of the eighteenth century. Toward this phenomenon Imperial Germany adopted an attitude almost archaic. . . . Germany became the land of political romanticism. This great contrast of spirit then combined with more material divergencies. The new political orientation was adopted in western Europe and America by the interests of bourgeois capitalism, while the same classes in Germany rendered service to the political romanticism of the absolutistic state. Enlightenment conquered romanticism, or to express it in terms of the antithesis with which we have become familiar in this history of the league-of-nations idea in Germany, Kant conquered Hegel (pp. 154-155).

It is, of course, necessary to follow the author's analysis of German thought contained in the body of the work before one fully understands his meaning. He begins with Leibniz, who sought to apply the plans of the Abbé St. Pierre and of Crucé toward strengthening the Holy Roman Empire and making it a true civitas dei. Leibniz and his school justified this end mainly upon teleologic principles. Against this complacent philosophy, the most effective blow was struck by Rousseau. The author thinks that Rousseau changed the whole trend of German pacifist thought, for his influence was widely reflected in the writings of Herder, Wieland and Kant.

The author rightly gives to Kant the place of honor among German philosophers dealing with international relations. He emphasizes the fact that Kant was the first to develop the idea of a league of nations upon purely ethical and legal grounds. Kant favored the idea as a result of logical deductions, whereas with Schelling and Wagner it was the goal

of universal evolution; and with Novalis, a religious postulate (p. 54). The author points to the widespread influence of Kant outside Germany; what is of especial interest to us, he indicates that the resolutions of the Massachusetts Legislative Assembly of 1844, dealing with a league of nations, followed closely the proposals of Kant (p. 80).

In direct conflict with the Kantian school was the philosophy of Hegel, for it could not tolerate the idea of any limitation upon the sovereignty of states. The Hegelian statesman regards even the conception of a binding treaty between states only in the nature of a paradox. The author's analysis of the many contributions made by others on both sides of this irrepressible conflict is most valuable; it is clear, logical, and yet not overextended.

Curiously enough, so far as the practical elaboration of plans for world organization is concerned, the most notable contributions were not made by Germans at all, but by two distinguished Swiss publicists, Sartorius and Bluntschli, who for a time taught at German universities. Even Vattel, to whom the author refers as "the Geheimrat of Dresden" (p. 91), was also Swiss, although long in the diplomatic service of Saxony.

In the conflict between the Kantian and Hegelian philosophies, the author discovers an explanation of the World War. But the war did not prove so much that Kant had conquered Hegel in the world outside Germany, as that Hegel conquered Kant in the homeland of both. Indeed, Kant's victory still remains to be won. No one seems to realize this better than the author; and, having made his apology, he finally asserts his hope that, in the end, national and international interests may tend to become identified through the influence of better social education and the growth of human solidarity.

ARTHUR K. KUHN.

A Monograph on Plebiscites, with a collection of official documents. By SARAH WAMBAUGH. Prepared under the supervision of James Brown Scott, Director of the Division of International Law of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. New York: Oxford University Press, 1920, pp. xxxv+1088.

The Employment of the Plebiscite in the Determination of Sovereignty. By JOHANNES MATTERN. [Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, Series XXXVIII, No. 3.] Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1920, pp. ix + 214.

When President Wilson returned to the Peace Conference in March, 1919, he carried with him advance sheets of a part of Miss Wambaugh's work, which had been in preparation during the preceding year, and which

has since been completed and published. The President himself had declared on the Fourth of July, 1918, that "the settlement of every question, whether of territory, of sovereignty, of economic arrangement, or of political relationship, must be upon the basis of free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned," and his repeated enunciation of the doctrine of national self-determination had been accepted as inspired guidance for the deliberations of the peace congress in Paris.

It is doubtful whether President Wilson studied Miss Wambaugh's book with care during those March days aboard the George Washington, but it is to be hoped at any rate that all serious students of international law, especially those interested in the problems dependent upon transfers of sovereignty, will possess it and use it. It is sound and reliable. As a work of reference it is unique and invaluable.

Miss Wambaugh devotes 170 pages to a clear and succinct historical essay on the practical use of the plebiscite, or referendum, in sanctioning changes of sovereignty through separation, cession, and annexation, beginning with the French Revolution. She shows how at first it was applied in good faith in the annexations of Avignon, Savoy and Nice, and then used as a political subterfuge in the later annexations of the Belgian communes and the Rhineland, only to be destroyed by Napoleon's growing ambition for conquest over a world of enemies. The next and most prosperous period of plebiscitary history was from 1848 to 1870. Says the author:

Recognized as the creative force of the new Italian kingdom; made the basis of the union of Tuscany, Emilia, Sicily, Naples, the Marches, and Umbria; repeated in the subsequent union of Venetia and Rome; stipulated in the treaty of Turin for the cession of Savoy; endorsed, though unsuccessfully, by the chief Powers at the Conference of London as the only solution for the Schleswig question; followed by Great Britain in her cession of the Ionian Islands to Greece; inserted in the treaty of Prague between Austria and Prussia:-by 1866 the method of appeal to a vote of the inhabitants, either by plebiscite or by representative assemblies especially elected, bade fair to establish itself as a custom amounting to law. Another philosophy was rising, however. The Prussian annexation of Schleswig in 1867, without regard to the provisions of the treaty of Prague, and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 dealt the principle a blow which, the world being under German tutelage in matters of historical criticism and the philosophy of the state, was practically fatal. After 1870 it was given a nebulous continuance by the treaty of 1877 between France and Sweden for the cession of St. Bartholomew, and by the treaty of Ancon between Chile and Peru.

From the Congress of Berlin in 1878 to the outbreak of the World War in 1914 the notion of self-determination had no place in the international usages of Europe.

Essentially, however, Miss Wambaugh's work is not an historical essay or a legal study. It is first and foremost a source-book, presenting in chronological sequence the chief documents relating to plebiscites-precisely how they were authorized, how they were taken, and what were their

results from the plebiscite of Avignon in 1791 to that of Norway in 1905. The original text of each document is given wherever available and is paralleled by an English translation. In some cases extracts have been made where space could be economized without sacrificing accuracy in presentation. On the whole, the work is done thoroughly and well. Altogether it constitutes a store-house of information for the discerning student not only as to the practical uses of the plebiscite, but also as to its historical abuses.

Dr. Mattern's book, though undertaken as a doctoral dissertation and quite independently, nicely supplements Miss Wambaugh's. It is not a collection of documents, but an historical essay and a legal study. Dr. Mattern devotes five of his nine chapters to a critical historical survey, which, like Miss Wambaugh's, treats of the plebiscites of the French Revolution and of the nineteenth century, but which, unlike Miss Wambaugh's, deals with "the plebiscite in ancient and feudal times," and with "the plebiscites in the peace treaties ending the World War."

His chapter on ancient and feudal times is largely negative in character: it repeats the well-known fact that ancient Greece and Rome practiced a kind of plebiscite in their internal affairs but recognized nothing of the sort in foreign relations, and it manfully combats the contention of Solière that from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries no annexation could be pronounced "without the assent of the people or of the notables."

In fact Dr. Mattern's whole historical survey is pessimistic in tone. He makes it clear that prior to the World War the principle of national self-determination had been recognized, and the plebiscite had practically been employed, "only in individual cases and with the consent of, or upon pressure from, the Power or Powers directly or indirectly interested in each instance as it presented itself" (p. 128). And his study of the sorry intricacies of Parisian diplomacy in 1918-1919 confirms and strengthens his depression. President Wilson went to Paris in March, 1918, with Miss Wambaugh's book. Dr. Mattern's book might appropriately have accompanied the President back to the United States.

The most valuable part of Dr. Mattern's work is the last three chapters, wherein he discusses various aspects of the plebiscite in the light of its uses and abuses from 1789 to 1919. He considers it in practice and in theory from the standpoint of international law and from that of constitutional law. He concludes "that the Peace Treaties ending the World War have so far not established a universal or even general practice of a settlement of territorial questions on the basis of the principle of self-determination by the plebiscite, nor have they eliminated acquisitions of territory on the implied principle if not the expressed terms of conquest" (p. 194). He maintains that, from the point of view of constitutional law, no state can recognize the right of secession founded upon the principle of self-determination, and he renews the doubt expressed by Oppenheim in 1912