The members of the Central American Peace Conference, held at Washington in 1907, primarily intent upon devising all possible ways and means of maintaining permanent peace in the Isthmus, sought to introduce into the treaties which resulted from the Conference not only those means and recourses which experience had shown would preserve good understanding and harmony among the five states, but, more particularly, they endeavored to find new methods which would strengthen the desideratum of the Conference by eliminating the causes of civil or interstate wars which might in the future occur in the Central American countries.

Naturally, the arsenal to which the Conference had to turn for the new arms to combat the causes of and prevent all war and revolution, could be none other than historical experience and the principles of international law.

The outbreak of the European War found hundreds of merchant vessels of belligerent nationality in enemy ports or on the high seas bound to or from such ports in ignorance of the existence of hostilities, having left their last port of departure before the outbreak of war. The short period antedating the outbreak of the war, during which hostilities may be said to have been imminent, and the suddenness with which the war burst out afforded little opportunity to such vessels to escape, and consequently large numbers were caught either in enemy ports or on the high seas proceeding innocently thereto or therefrom.

Although the development of international law has tended more and more to confine the operations of war to such as are directed against the armed forces of the belligerents and to relieve the peaceful population from their immediate effects, nevertheless a number of practices employed principally for the purpose of bringing economic pressure to bear upon the general mass of enemy non-combatants, still survive in full vigor and are well recognized as legitimate. One of the most important of this class of operations is blockade. The end of blockade is to cut off trade and intercourse with specified ports or with a specified coast line in possession of the enemy.

The extent to which belligerents may interfere with the commerce of neutrals, on sea or land, has been in all wars a question of warm and continued dispute. A powerful belligerent is apt to proceed lawlessly, and a powerful neutral is apt to claim more rights than the authorities concede. It could-not be expected that the present state of war, involving every first class Power in the world, except the United States, and many of the lesser states as well, would be free from such complications, and this expectation has certainly been realized.

It would be improvident to undertake the discussion of so broad a topic as the whole of this controversy. This writer has several times, before considerable assemblies and in various publications, ventured to express his opinion on one limited portion of this dispute, namely, as to the right of neutrals to export munitions of war to belligerents and the extent to which the other belligerents are entitled to complain of or interrupt such trade.

A few years of experience with the Permanent Court of Arbitration served to make clear the points on which it could be improved. “There was thus created,” wrote James Brown Scott as reporter of the project for a Court of Arbitral Justice, “a single institution which might decide purely legal questions on the basis of respect for law, and broader questions of a non-judicial nature, either or both of which were to be decided by judges, that is arbiters, chosen by the parties in controversy. In modern states judicial questions are decided by judges in courts of justice, and the judges are not the direct appointees of the parties. In matters of purely private interest which may be compromised, judges of the parties’ choice are as much in place as they would be out of place in a court of justice.”

The policy of the United States Government in permitting the exportation of arms, munitions, and other war supplies for the use of belligerents during the present war has been the subject of much discussion in Congress and in the press and has provoked diplomatic remonstrances from the Governments of Germany and Austria-Hungary. As a general proposition, it has been admitted by those who complain of the extensive traffic which has gone on between American manufacturers and certain of the belligerents, that neutral governments are not by the existing rules of international law bound to prevent their nationals from engaging in such traffic; but it has been argued that special circumstances to which the present war has given rise give a “new conception to the aspect of neutrality” and that an abnormal and unprecedented situation has been created which makes the continued furnishing of arms and munitions to the belligerents on one side, when their adversaries are unable to avail themselves of the American markets, a violation of the spirit of strict neutrality.

In approaching the discussion of the effects of the acquisition of Porto Rico as a result of the Treaty of Paris of 1899, we are confronted by one of the most difficult problems arising in the consideration of the relations between the United States and Porto Rico. The difficulty is due in a great measure to the absence of a positive, unequivocal and unanimous opinion of the Supreme Court in the decision of the so-called Insular Cases, which have given rise to so much doubt, uncertainty and difference of opinion among lawyers in regard to this vital subject.

If the acquisition of Porto Rico had been the only one made by the United States at that time, the problem would have been comparatively easy. It would have been enough, perhaps, to turn to the earlier precedents laid down by the Supreme Court to find sufficient guiding light and ample authority to arrive at a satisfactory solution. Congress itself, probably, would have rendered it unnecessary to appeal to the Supreme Court by doing complete justice to the people who had received the United States with such sincere demonstrations of rejoicing, friendship and affection.