and of Collections Relating to Treaties BY DENYS PETER MYERS, A.B. CORRESPONDING SECRETARY AND LIBRARIAN PRINTED AT THE EXPENSE OF THE VE RI DS CAMBRIDGE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1922 PREFACE THE Scope of this book is defined by the title. The aim has been to present for ready reference the contractual and conventional material of international relations down to the outbreak of the World War. The bibliographic form has been used for the sake of convenience and precision. It may reasonably be claimed that in a broader sense the book covers the field of history. "A collection of treaties," says Noradounghian Effendi in the preface to his Recueil d'actes internationaux de l'Empire Ottoman, “is of itself a complete philosophy of history. For every one of them either summarizes the political conclusions of a period, or defines the relations of peoples among themselves, or marks the point of departure of a new phase of these relations. They are like so many landmarks on the road traversed either by one nation alone or by a group of states. Being the skeleton of history, they serve as the basis both of diplomacy and of international law. Therefore, their study is, under its apparent dryness, of the greatest interest and of a multifarious and incontestable usefulness." The conduct of international relations involves every human interest that is not by its very nature confined within national limits. If, for instance, in fiscal policy, taxation has no international aspect, tariff schedules have. A military budget may be a nation's affair; but it is justified internally by the status of external relations, and it again reacts outside of national borders upon that status. Even social problems of individual welfare find their way into a field of international relations which of late has been rapidly increasing in importance. Nearly half of the present work is devoted to international relations of a nonpolitical character. In view of the complexity and wide dispersion of the published documents relating to treaties and international conventions, it is not surprising that the historian has only casually gone to these |