There is, however, a preliminary question upon which, with your permission, I should like to say a few words. My friend justly observes that in dealing with the Declaration "the first necessity is to know what it is that we have before us"; and he devotes his letter of January 31 to maintaining that the Declaration must be read as interpreted by the explanations of it given to the full Conference by the Drafting Committee, of which M. Renault was president. Professor Westlake supports his opinion by a quotation from the reply of the Foreign Office in November last to the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce (_Miscell._ 1910, No. 4, p. 21). I may mention that a similar reply had been given, a year previously, by Mr. McKinnon Wood to a question in the House of Commons. The source of these replies is doubtless to be found in a paragraph of the Report, addressed on March 1, 1909, to Sir Edward Grey, of the British Delegates to the London Conference, which runs as follows:-- "It should be borne in mind that, in accordance with the principles and practice of Continental jurisprudence, such a Report is considered an authoritative statement of the meaning and intention of the instrument which it explains, and that consequently foreign Governments and Courts, and no doubt also the International Prize Court, will construe and interpret the provisions of the Declaration by the light of the Commentary given in the Report." (_Miscell._ 1909, No. 4, p. 94.) It is desirable to know upon what authority this statement rests. I am aware of none. The nearest approach to an assertion of anything like it occurred at The Hague Conference of 1899, when the "approval" accorded to "the work of the Second Committee, as embodied in the articles voted and in the interpretative Report which accompanies them" was alleged by M. de Martens to amount to an acceptance of the Report "comme un commentaire interprétatif authentique des articles votés." (_Miscell._ 1899, No. 1, p. 165.) The drafting Report presented to the Geneva Conference of 1906 is merely said to have been "adopted" (Actes, p. 286); and M. Renault's Report to the Conference of London was similarly merely "accepted," although he presented it as containing "Un commentaire précis, dégagé de tout controverse, qui, devenu commentaire officiel par l'approbation de la Conférence, soit de nature à guider les autorités diverses, administratives, militaires, judiciaires, qui pourront avoir à l'appliquer." (_Miscell._ 1909, No. 5, p. 344.)