Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: magazine articles, while these, especially in this country, are only too often mere digests of the law without even suggestions as to causes and effects. The evil of verbose and prolix judicial opinions may be a crying one, but its remedy would seem to lie more in individual discretion than in such radical action as proposed. Reference to arbitration in all disputes of whatever nature will not become possible nor indeed will the principle itself be seriously entertained or relied upon by nations until, either by changes supplementing the rules of international law at present existing, or by treaty, the rules of law are developed so as to render the rights of parties under given conditions capable of being clearly ascertained, and the remedies to be applied certain and such as under all the circumstances will work substantial justice between the governments concerned. In controversies concerning land some period of limitation ought to be fixed upon whereby the adverse possession of territory for a certain length of time should be deemed conclusive evidence as to title, thus placing territorial disputes between nations in a position to be dealt with upon a basis analogous to that upon which private titles to real estate are now adjusted. It is unreasonable to demand or expect that an independent state will consent to refer questions affecting the rights and citizenship of its own subjects, who have been for many years in peaceable possession of a tract of territory in good faith believing they had a right to occupy it, to any tribunal, however eminent, whose decision might be conclusively determined by the contents of some docu- ument exhumed from among the refuse of former centuries. The Venezuela Boundary Treaty was of course designed to fit a particular instance and its...