OCCASIONEM COGNOSCE

Scrutinizing with legal detachment the developments of the Sino-Japanese crisis, President Lowell, in Foreign Affairs, reenforces his advocacy of an economic boycott by a thoughtful analysis of the relations of the League of Nations and the United States to the affair. Although its chronological summary of the diplomacy involved and its pessimistic prophesy for the future degeneration of the League are careful and thorough, the article's greatest importance lies in a penetrating criticism of the legal aspects of the Kellogg-Briand Pact and a presagement of international instability as a consequence of Secretary Stimson's January 7 letter, advocating the annulment of all treaties exacted by force.

That letter others have blindly eulogized as the only effective method of enforcing the Pact of Paris, as giving a new face to the shattered Nine Power treaties, and thus as the only feasible method of deterring Japan from further violence. But President Lowell has attempted to look beyond immediate effects and to discover, if possible, its ultimate significance. With a well buttressed premise that the Kellogg-Briand Pact is not, strictly speaking, a treaty and that it authorizes no enforcement against refractory signatories, the article moves on to predict portentous effects of the Stimson letter upon international relations in the future. Instead of encouraging an immediate forceful alteration of unsatisfactory treaties, such a policy would lead to lengthy controversies about rights, protracted friction between disputing powers, and possible hostilities. Furthermore, universally accepted it would provide a highly undesirable loophole of indefinite claims through which an unscrupulous nation might, on convenient occasions, "repudiate its treaties and disregard those of others on the ground of duress".

Pessimistic as the attitude may appear, it gains weight through Japan's technical prestidigitations in the present difficulty. But its greatest significance arises with the report that the Assembly of the League of Nations has unanimously accepted the principle of the January 7 letter as applying not only to the current complication in the Far East, but to every nation and every treaty under the aegis of the League. Temporary exigencies have blinded diplomats to the ultimate consequences of such a policy, and when the present emergency is past the League would do well to reconsider its step in the light of President Lowell's suggestions.