Then the Government went on:
“Now it is precisely this assumption which is no longer valid as regards states which are members of the League of Nations and parties to the Peace Pact. The effect of those instruments, taken together, is to deprive nations of the right to employ war as an instrument of national policy, and to forbid the states which have signed them to give aid or comfort to an offender.”
This was being said in 1929, when there was no war upon the horizon.
“As between such states, there has been in consequence a fundamental change in the whole question of belligerent and neutral rights. The whole policy of His Majesty’s present Government (and, it would appear, of any alternative government) is based upon a determination to comply with their obligations under the Covenant of the League and the Peace Pact. This being so, the situation which we have to envisage in the event of a war in which we were engaged is not one in which the rights and duties of belligerents and neutrals will depend upon the old rules of war and neutrality, but one in which the position of the members of the League will be determined by the Covenant and by the Pact.”
The Chief Prosecutor for the United States of America referred in his opening speech before this Tribunal to the weighty pronouncement of Mr. Stimson, the Secretary of War, in which, in 1932, he gave expression to the drastic change brought about in international law by the Pact of Paris, and it is perhaps convenient to quote the relevant passage in full:
“War between nations was renounced by the signatories of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. This means that it has become illegal throughout practically the entire world. It is no longer to be the source and subject of rights. It is no longer to be the principle around which the duties, the conduct, and the rights of nations revolve. It is an illegal thing. Hereafter, when two nations engage in armed conflict, either one or both of them must be wrongdoers—violators of this general treaty law. We no longer draw a circle about them and treat them with the punctilios of the duelist’s code. Instead we denounce them as law-breakers.”
And nearly 10 years later, when numerous independent states lay prostrate, shattered or menaced in their very existence before the impact of the war machine of the Nazi State, the Attorney General of the United States, subsequently a distinguished member of the highest Tribunal of that great country, gave significant expression to the change which had been effected in the law as the result of the Pact of Paris in a speech for which the freedom-loving peoples of the world will always be grateful. On the 27th of March 1941—and I mention it now not as merely being the speech of a statesman, although it was certainly that, but as being the considered opinion of a distinguished lawyer,—he said this:
“The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, in which Germany, Italy and Japan covenanted with us, as well as with other nations, to renounce war as an instrument of policy, made definite the outlawry of war and of necessity altered the dependent concept of neutral obligations.
“The Treaty for the Renunciation of War and the Argentine Anti-War Treaty deprived their signatories of the right of war as an instrument of national policy or aggression and rendered unlawful wars undertaken in violation of these provisions. In consequence these treaties destroyed the historical and juridical foundations of the doctrine of neutrality conceived as an attitude of absolute impartiality in relation to aggressive wars . . . .