206 WRIGHT— LIMITATIONS UPON NATIONAL POWERS. 



whether it had jurisdiction. This treaty and protocol, although 

 never operative, were consented to by the Senate in 1911.''^ 



In 191 1 President Taft negotiated arbitration treaties with 

 Great Britain and France providing for the arbitration of defined 

 classes of cases and for decision by an international joint high 

 commission upon the question of whether a specific dispute was 

 within these classes. '^^ The Senate Foreign Relations Committee 

 reported adversely on the latter provision : '^^ 



" This recommendation is made because there can be no question 

 that, through the machinery of the joint commission, as provided in Articles 

 II and III and with the last clause of Article III included, the Senate is de- 

 prived of its constituent power to pass upon all questions involved in any 

 treaty submitted to it in accordance with the Constitution. The committee 

 believes that it would be a violation of the Constitution of the United States 

 to confer upon an outside commission, powers which, under the Constitution, 

 devolve upon the Senate. . . . To vest in an outside commission the power to 

 say finally what the treaty means by its very general and indefinite language 

 is to vest in that commission the power to make for us an entirely different 

 treaty from that which we supposed ourselves to be making." 



The delegation of power here objected to was of the same sort 

 as that to which exception had been taken in the Hay treaties of 

 1905. In the one case, however, delegation was to the Pres- 



■^6 Charles, Treaties, p. 262. A constitutional objection of a different 

 kind connected with this convention is considered, infra, sec. 64. The Hague 

 Convention of 1907 provided in article 53 that the Permanent Court might 

 arrange the conipromis on application of one party where the dispute is 

 " covered by a general treaty of arbitration concluded or renewed after the 

 present convention has come into, force," specifying subjects for compulsory 

 arbitration; and where the dispute arises from contract debts due by one 

 power to the nationals of another. (Malloy, Treaties, p. 2238.) The Senate 

 consented to ratification of the treaty with a reservation to this article assert- 

 ing that the United States " excludes from the competence of the permanent 

 court the power to frame the ' conipromis ' required by general or special 

 treaties of arbitration concluded or hereafter to be concluded by the United 

 States, and further expressly declares that the ' compromis ' required by 

 any treaty of arbitration to which the United States may be a party shall 

 be settled only by agreement between the contracting parties, unless such 

 treaty shall expressly provide otherwise." (Ibid., p. 2248, and Scott, ed., 

 Reports of the Hague Conferences, introduction, p. xxvii.) 



7^ These treaties though never ratified are printed in Charles, Treaties, 

 pp. 380-389. 



^8 62d Cong., 1st sess., S. Doc. 98, p. 6; Cong. Rec, 47: 3935. 



