504 INTERNATIONAL LAW 



committee. Or yet, whether it will be necessary to wait for its 

 preparation until an international parliament shall become a real- 

 ity. 



If one is to refer to what has been done hitherto, it is evident that 

 this care will be intrusted to diplomacy assisted, perhaps, by a 

 special commission. It is a fact that diplomacy has definitely 

 formulated in the Convention of July 9, 1899, the laws and customs 

 of war on land, as it had previously formulated the rules relating 

 to the care to be given to the wounded belonging to land military 

 forces, and extended its scope by the special Convention of July 

 9, 1899, also to the wounded in naval war. The laws and customs 

 of war had been drafted long before by the Institute of International 

 Law, and had been adopted, in fact, by most of the governments of 

 civilized countries. 



The work to be performed by diplomacy in codifying the rules of 

 the law of nations would not offer greater difficulties than the draft- 

 ing of the laws of war, brought about by the deliberations of the 

 Peace Conference. This will be mainly a work of coordination, for 

 all the ticklish questions of the law of nations have been studied 

 by notable jurists, and an almost complete understanding exists 

 between them upon the essential points. 



We had noted, shortly before, that the calling of an international 

 parliament should, perhaps, precede the adoption of an international 

 code which would essentially be the work of such a deliberating 

 assembly. But the answer might be made that the gathering of 

 such an assembly hardly seems probable. As for us, we deem that 

 the calling of such a parliament has become a necessity, and that, 

 therefore, it may become an early reality. Such an assembly exists 

 even now, and though it has limited its work to the few questions 

 of more immediate importance, it constitutes none the less an inter- 

 national deliberating body, created out of the various parliaments 

 of the world. We are now alluding to the Interparliamentary 

 Conference, constituted in 1899, and which held its twelfth session in 

 St. Louis in 1904. This session has been particularly remarkable 

 in that its object was precisely the adoption of a resolution to the 

 effect that the states be requested to call an international parliament, 

 a congress of nations. It is interesting to note that it is upon this 

 American land, at the outset of the movement for peace, that a 

 competition was opened on the question of what would be the best 

 mode to employ for the purpose of assuring the organization of a 

 congress of nations. It is from the land of America, one century 

 after, that a call for identically the same purpose has just been issued 

 with the approval of the representatives of fifteen divers parliaments. 

 This shows that the idea is not Utopian, and that it appears as the 

 logical consequence of all international evolution. 



