Viii PREFACE 



by most statesmen and international jurists in the briefest 

 fashion, amounting to practically nothing more than an 

 expression of a favorable or unfavorable view. 



Freudenthal, and before him Stoerk in his Option und 

 Plcbiscit bei Erohcrungcn und Gehictsccssioncn . . . , Leip- 

 zig, 1879, discusses in some detail the historical development 

 and the constitutional and international legal phases of the 

 doctrine of popular consent up to the time of their writing. 



Rouard de Card in Les Annexions ct Ics plebiscites dans 

 I'histoire contemporaine {£tudes de droit international . . . , 

 Paris, 1890), and Soliere in the work cited, are less com- 

 prehensive in this respect than either Stoerk or Freuden- 

 thal, while Borgeaud's study, Histoire du plebiscite . . . , 

 le plebiscite dans I'antiquitc — Grcce et Rome — Geneve, 1887, 

 confines itself to considerations of the plebiscite as an ex- 

 pression of the popular will in the inner affairs of ancient 

 Rome and Greece. 



Andre David's recent doctoral thesis, Les Plebiscites et 

 les cessions de territoires, Paris, 1918, contributes to the 

 existing literature chiefly in his last chapter, in which he 

 argues in favor of the return to France of Alsace and Lor- 

 raine without the consultation of the population by way of 

 a plebiscite. 



E. Wittmann's Past and Present of the Right of Na- 

 tional Self-Detennination, translated from the Hungarian 

 by C. Biddle, Amsterdam, 1919, could not be secured in 

 time to be considered for the present study. A perusal of 

 Wittmann's work does, however, show that the author de- 

 votes himself primarily to the treatment of the principle of 

 national self-determination as an end in itself, and that the 

 plebiscite as the means towards this end finds only a passing 

 mention. 



The following consideration of The Employment of the 

 Plebiscite in the Determination of Sovereignty had its 

 origin in a Seminar paper undertaken in the fall of 1917 at 

 the instance of Dr. A. C. Millspaugh. who, during Prof. 

 W. W. Willoughby's absence from The Johns Hopkins 



