Thomas Erskine Holland: “To open and facilitate the settlement of trifling disputes between nations by judicial methods, war being unquestionably…”

It would be calamitous should a practice be introduced of attempting to cure the imperfect expression of a treaty by tacking on to it an equally authoritative reasoned commentary, likely, as in the present case, to be enormously longer…

Already in the first weeks of the war England had renounced the Declaration of London, the contents of which her own delegates had recognised as binding in international law.

It is surely notorious that the delegates of a Power, by agreeing to the draft of a treaty, give to it no international validity, which results only when the treaty has been ratified by their Government.

The elaborate classification of contraband had to be at once thrown overboard, and most of the remaining provisions of the Declaration proved to be inapplicable to modern warfare.