John W. Davis
Published: 2015-07-03
Total Pages: 24
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Excerpt from The Treaty-Making Power in the United States: An Address It is not easy for a Diplomatic officer, in search of a subject upon which to address a serious-minded body like the Oxford University British-American Club, to select a topic at the same time sufficiently concrete to be of interest, and sufficiently abstract to be within his permitted limits. He must forgo, of course, any discussion of matters in train between his Government and the one to which he is accredited; he must be dumb upon all political questions agitating his own countrymen; while as to those which disturb the serenity of his hosts he must, for his life, be not only dumb but to outward appearance deaf as well. Such restrictions, you will realize, are rather a severe abridgement of the Constitutional right of free speech. They leave their unfortunate subject little secure footing outside the realm of palaeontology or the higher mathematics. I believe, however, that I shall not transgress if I ask you to consider the history and scope of the treaty-making power of the United States, or rather, from the point of view I have in mind, their treaty-making machinery. It is not impossible that some of its manifestations have come to your attention within the last twelve months; and from time to time there has been reason to fear that not all who witnessed its revolutions, or heard the clanking of its parts, have understood the mechanical principles by which it was controlled. Doubtless none of this audience fall within this category; but since you exist not only to secure but to disseminate information between our countries, I offer no apology for inviting your attention to the particular function of government with which all nations are reciprocally concerned. There is a peculiar reason for such studies on the part of Britons and Americans. As no two nations are so much alike, so none are exposed to greater danger from a failure to recognize their differences. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.