Thomas Erskine Holland: “Pacific reprisals should also, according to the tendency of modern opinion and practice, be so applied as not to…”

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…

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.

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.