Thomas Erskine Holland: “Perpetual peace is a dream, and it is not even a beautiful dream.”

The Declaration of London has, most fortunately, never been ratified by the Government of Great Britain.

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…

This power has been so freely exercised, and large portions of the Declaration, not thereby affected, have proved to be so inapplicable to modern conditions, as disclosed by the war, that the document, so far from providing reliable…

Its admirers have, however, too long preserved it, perhaps sub spe rati, in a state of suspended animation, using it by way of, as they supposed, a convenient handbook of maritime law for the purposes of the present war, though subject to…