Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 18.pdf/413

 THE GREEN BAG the three rules of the Treaty of Washington, his dictionaries of International Law and Diplomacy, and, finally, his great work, "Le droit international the"orique et pra tique, pre'ce'de' d'un expose" historique des progres de la science du droit des gens." The first edition was published in Spanish at Paris in 1868, but the subsequent editions were in French, of which the first volumes appeared respectively in 1870, 1880, 1887, and 1896. The final or fifth edition com prises six large volumes. Calvo was a man of whom it can be rightly said that he was "learned in the law." His powers of research and industry were tremendous, and his great work, "Le Droit International," is a storehouse of information, but he was not possessed of a keen analytic mind and it is extremely difficult to place him on disputed points, as he is liable to give both sides of a question ae the law without recognizing the conflict between them. This is true even where

he is advocating a traditional Latin-Ameri can view, such as the doctrine just noticed of the equal liability of a government to its own citizens and to strangers, where he largely undermines his own case by his previous expression of the very extended protection which governments owe. He was essentially a compiler rather than a deep thinker or man of affairs, and it was not until he was well along in life that he was given an important post, that of Minister to Berlin, which was apparently given him as a recognition of the reputation his work on International Law, which was then in its third edition, had won for him. The work on which his future name will depend is almost certainly his voicing of the tradi tional views of the Latin-American peoples on questions of international law and polity, the most important of which we have just considered. NEW YORK, N. Y., June, 1906.