xviii MINUTES. 



this was to be considered as an act of war or as " making war." 

 Sometimes it is helpful to visualize a question by bringing it home 

 to ourselves. Let us suppose that some foreign power, for instance, 

 Great Britain, or France, or Germany, feeling dissatisfied with the 

 form of apology tendered by us for a temporary interference the 

 week before with the movements of one of its consular or naval 

 officers in the United States, should by military force attack and 

 seize the port and city of Philadelphia, take control of Broad Street 

 station and the Pennsylvania railroad, set up a military administra- 

 tion at the City Hall, and, using as a seat of custom the historic 

 edifice (Independence Hall) in which we are now assembled, proceed 

 to collect national duties and local revenues. How would this strike 

 us ? Should we gently dream that the power committing these acts 

 of hostility was exemplifying the arts and processes of peace? In 

 reality an affirmative answer would confound all our conceptions, 

 moral as well as legal. Such acts would necessarily strike a French- 

 man, a German, a Japanese, a Mexican, or any other human being, 

 lawyer or layman, learned or unlearned, at home, in the same way, 

 as acts of war, and he would not be wrong. The Greytown inci- 

 dent, which has often been cited to prove that such a proceeding 

 would not be war or an act of war, can not properly be invoked as 

 a precedent, since Greytown was a community claiming to exist out- 

 side the bounds of any recognized state or political entity, and the 

 legality of the action taken against it was defended by President 

 Pierce and Secretary Marcy on that express ground. It should also 

 be superfluous to remark that the fact that the government of the 

 United States, although it had continued to maintain diplomatic 

 intercourse with the Huerta government, had not formally recog- 

 nized it, is altogether irrelevant. One nation can not divest another 

 of its rights and immunities as an independent state by withholding 

 formal recognition from its government. 



There is yet another matter to which I venture to advert, and that 

 is the enormous increase within the past six or seven years of the 

 number of publications relating to international affairs. The noto- 

 riously high cost of printing does not seem to have operated as a 

 check on what may in industrial phrase be called the output. But 



