Thomas Erskine Holland: “It is surely desirable that henceforth Great Britain should know, and that other nations should at least have the means…”

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…

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

The fact is that the vitally important questions of theory and practice raised by the Convention and the Declaration need calmer and better instructed discussion than they have yet received.