THE PRESENT AND FUTURE STATE OF INTERNATIONAL 



LAW 



BY HENRI LA FONTAINE 

 (Translated by Maurice Lton, Esq., of the New York Bar) 



[Henri La Fontaine, attorney of the Court of Appeals, Senator of the Kingdom 

 of Belgium, Brussels, b. April 22, 1854. LL.D. Free University of Brussels. 

 Professor of International Law at the New University of Brussels, 1894; 

 Director of the International Bureau of Bibliography, 1895. Member of the 

 International Bureau of Peace, 1893. Author and editor of The Rights and 

 Duties of Builders of Public Works; Treatise on Counterfeiting; International 

 Pasigraph;/; Compendious and Chronologic History of International Arbitra- 

 tion; Bibliography of Peace and Arbitration.] 



THE legal needs of men are modified in the course of centuries, as 

 are their material and intellectual needs. Laws have been multiplied 

 like products and works, and out of primitive, shapeless, and chaotic 

 custom have sprung successively all the legal categories, the law of 

 private rights, the law of commerce, admiralty law, constitutional 

 law, administrative law, penal law, industrial law. 



The easy communications, the universal exchange of merchandise, 

 the very recent organization of the world market, have almost 

 suddenly given to the category which entered last the legal domain, 

 to international law, a considerable and dominating importance. 

 Internationalism is now ubiquitous; it is becoming difficult to under- 

 take an enterprise or create an institution, the expansion of which 

 will not perforce be international, and that word has henceforth 

 conquered such favor that it is applied to the least international 

 matters. Law is fated to follow the general evolution. It is the 

 plastic armor of humanity, and that armor has modeled itself at all 

 times upon humanity with extraordinary precision. 



Therefore, international law is not, strictly speaking, a law dis- 

 tinct from all others. It is only the enlargement, according to the 

 size of the whole world, of the divers legal categories. It is as vast 

 of itself as all the national legislations, over which it is superposed 

 and which it is destined to absorb and unify. Its domain is immense, 

 and one understands easily how it is that the societies and publica- 

 tions, which are devoted solely to the study of questions relating 

 to international law, have multiplied to a singular extent these last 

 years. 



The problems of international law relate essentially to two main 

 and traditional subdivisions, private international law, which 

 regulates the legal relations between individuals of different nation- 

 alities or the private rights of the individuals who are regarded as 



