dorships should be created without the consent of Congress, in either case cutting off the power of the executive to fix the status of his envoys or to send secret agents or anomalous missions. But the attempt has always been ineffectual. The courts have not been in position to give an authoritative construction of the Constitution in such matters; but the Attorneys General have advised that all such provisions must be deemed directory only, or in the nature of recommendations, and not mandatory.

Another point of special interest regards the exercise of the treaty-making power. Presidents have consulted the Senate not only as to the expediency of negotiating a particular treaty, but also as to its very terms. On the other hand, Congress has sometimes advised, and almost demanded, that treaties should be concluded with foreign powers. Usually such matters have taken their normal and constitutional course. But the gradual absorption of power in the hands of the executive is shown by the history of those kinds of international agreements which, as our author says, do not have to be submitted to the Senate for its advice and consent. Passing by such matters as postal, copyright, and trade mark conventions, and reciprocity agreements, one should not miss the significance of agreements entered into by the President, without the participation of the Senate, for the settlement of pecuniary claims of our citizens against foreign governments, or the protocol submitted to the Mexican commissioners at the session at Atlantic City in 1916, or the agreement which

President Roosevelt made in 1905 with Santo Domingo for putting the custom houses of that island under American control. "There are numerous devices," says Professor Corwin, “resorted to in ordinary diplomatic correspondence which frequently yield what are tantamount to agreements: a mere exchange of notes, such as took place in 1899 and 1900 between our State Department and the governments of Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, and Japan with reference to the 'open door' policy in China; and exchange of what are called identical notes, such as took place November 30, 1908, between the United States and Japan, whereby the two governments pledged their continued fidelity to the maintenance of the integrity of China and of equal commercial opportunity throughout the Chinese Empire for all nationalities [and again in 1917]; the 'gentlemen's agreement,' a new invention, such as that which at present regulates Japanese immigration to this country; and finally, the modus. vivendi, such as that which for more than a quarter of a century, after the termination of the Treaty of Washington in 1885, defined American fishing rights off the coasts of Canada and Newfoundland."

But the Senate has been very jealous of its constitutional right to share in the making of treaties, properly so called, and has often frustrated the plans of the executive, and there are some who think that it has gone much beyond the limits of its rightful power in the remodeling of treaties submitted to it. True, the making of a treaty must be "by and with the advice and

consent of the Senate." But while consent is manifested by a sufficient number of votes, advice is something which may be freely offered but which the recipient is equally free to reject. Yet the Senate has grown into a habit of dealing with a treaty submitted to it for approval-and it may be one which was very carefully drawn and the fruit of long and difficult negotiation-as simply to much raw material, out of which to fashion a treaty according to its own ideas, the changes being called "amendments." Professor Corwin alludes in passing to this practice. But it has happened more than once that a treaty of paramount importance in our international relations has been so overloaded with amendments that the discouraged executive, aware that the consent of the Senate cannot be obtained without incorporating the amendments, and aware, on the other hand, that the amended treaty would be utterly unacceptable to the foreign power, has simply let the matter drop. This happened to President Taft in his endeavor to secure general arbitration treaties. In a recent volume he says: "I have been greatly interested in securing the adoption of general treaties of arbitration to dispose of all justiciable questions that are likely to arise between the nations. I attempted to secure the ratification by the Senate of treaties of this kind which I had made with France and England. The Senate refused to confirm the treaties except with such narrowing amendments that it seemed to me futile to attempt to negotiate them." It was recently stated (and it certainly was at one time true) that "it is practically impossible

for a President, however intelligent and patriotic, to get a treaty confirmed against which a small body of senators have any objection." Is it not precisely in this fact that we are to find the explanation of “gentlemen's agreements" and other informal, not to say devious, methods of concluding agreements with foreign powers? Any fixed habit of the United States Senate is practically ineradicable. But on the letter of the Constitution, the practice of remodeling treaties cannot be defended. The President's appointments to office are also required to be made with the advice and consent of the Senate. Yet the Senate has never construed its "advice" in this matter to be anything more than personal and individual advice privately given. It would be a case exactly parallel with its dealings with treaties if the Senate, on receiving the nomination of Mr. A. to a certain office, should amend it by striking out the name of Mr. A. and substituting that of Mr. B.

Professor Corwin's final conclusion is that "the principal fruits of the doctrine that the control of foreign relations is an executive prerogative may be summarized thus: An unlimited discretion in the President in the recognition of new governments and states; an undefined authority in sending special agents abroad, of dubious diplomatic status, to negotiate treaties or for other purposes; a similarly undefined power to enter into compacts with other governments without the participation of the Senate; the practically complete and exclusive discretion in the negotiation of more formal treaties, and in their final ratification; the practically

complete and exclusive initiative in the official formulation of the nation's foreign policy. Meanwhile, Congress has established its practically exclusive right to abrogate treaties, both in their quality as law of the land and as international agreements; and recently it has asserted a highly questionable supervision over diplomatic grades. Its alleged right of recognition has, however, remained a mere shadow. On the whole, therefore, the net result of a century and a quarter of contest for power and influence in determining the international destinies of the country remains decisively and conspicuously in favor of the President. It is an outcome calculated to give pause to those who harp so unceasingly at 'secret diplomacy,' to say nothing of those who would wage wars by referendum. For if a nation situated as America has been in the past has found it necessary to center the control of its foreign policies more and more in the hands of one man, what of European states? One may avoid fatalism and yet cherish the conviction that historical institutions are seldom correctly assessed in indiscriminate abuse."

eignty. Rejecting the Hegelian conception of the state as sovereign in the sense of being a supreme and selfexistent being, superior to all its citizens, and upon whose mere will their lives and destinies must ultimately depend, he equally refuses to admit the purely individualistic doctrine, in which the state is no more than a voluntary relationship among its citizens, and they the collective sovereign. It is not easy to make a summary of the author's keen and well-rounded argument without doing it injustice. But essentially, he denies that there must be in each state a legally determinate superior whose will is certain of acceptance; he thinks that we must "find the true meaning of sovereignty, not in the coercive power possessed by its instrument, but in the fused good will for which it stands." "If we become inductive minded and make our principles grow out of the facts of social life, we shall admit that the sanction for the will of the state is going to depend largely on the persons who interpret it." And "the will of the state obtains pre-eminence over the wills of other groups exactly to the point where it is interpreted with sufficient wisdom to obtain general acceptance, and no further." In the last analysis, therefore, sovereignty means no more than the ability to secure consent. But the state is only one of the groups to which the individual belongs, and the others likewise have their real existence, their rights, and their claims upon his allegiance. "You must place your individual at the center of things. You must regard him as linked to a variety of associations to which his personality

attracts him. You must on this view admit that the state is only one of the associations to which he happens to belong, and give it exactly that pre-eminence, and no more, to which, on the particular occasion of conflict, its possibly superior moral claim will entitle it. In my view it does not attempt to take that pre-eminence by force; it wins it by consent. It proves to its members by what it performs that it possesses a claim inherently greater than, say, their church or trade-union." But it is pertinent to remark that if the state is sovereign only in the same way and on the same basis as the other group units, the state is just as much bound to keep its hands off their privileges and the control they exercise over their members as they are to obey the laws which the state makes. If the state, the municipality, the church, the whist club, the trade union, and the I. W. W. are all sovereign, how can the permanence of political institutions or private rights be hoped for in a

world which is still ruled, unhappily, not by philosophical ideals, but too largely by coercion?

Professor Laski's method is historical, and he has used for his material chiefly the ecclesiastical history of the last century, drawing lessons from such movements as disestablishment in Scotland, the Oxford movement, and the Catholic reaction in France. Thus it is that, instead of the political phiosophers of the past and of more recent ages, the prominent figures in his book are Newman and Manning, De Maistre and Bismarck. But his argument is that the problem they all severally dealt with is an eternal one, and his purpose is to indicate the change in the emphasis given to it in the course of modern history. A word of praise must be given to the excellent typographical style and appearance of the work. It is thoroughly in keeping with the very superior models which we have come to expect from the Yale University Press.