BY THE SECRETARY-GENERAL. PACIFIC BLOCKADE. By ALBERT E. HOGAN, LL. D. This is the only treatise in English exclusively upon this subject, and the author has discussed a minor topic of international law fully and fairly. His views are briefly that pacific blockade (the right to blockade the ports of another state in time of peace and without war necessarily resulting) is too new a practice to have become entirely regularized; that the state blockaded as well as the blockader, but not the third powers affected, may decline to look upon a specific case of pacific blockade as consistent with peace, and thus consider war to be a fact; that notice, effectiveness, days of grace, etc., are to be observed much as in ordinary blockade; that, unlike ordinary blockade, it may be limited to a certain commodity or a certain traffic; that the ships of third powers, attempting to run a pacific blockade, can only be turned back or at most detained, never seized and confiscated as if war existed; that this kind of coercion is better than war for all parties. Doctor Hogan is an Irishman and a professor of law at the University of Oxford in England, but his book and his views are being much discussed and widely criticised by American historical authorities. THE MYSTERY OF THE PINCKNEY DRAUGHT. By HON. CHARLES C. NOTT, formerly Chief Justice of the United States Court of Claims. This work is interesting throughout. Pinckney was not a great constructive statesman, but in the work of the convention he rendered valuable service in formulating many of the details embodied in the Constitution. It was not so much a new instrument of government that Pinckney framed in his original plan as it was a revision of the Articles of Confederation. In the preparation of his plan, Pinckney drew extensively upon the Articles of Confederation and the various state constitutions, especially that of New York. On May 29th, 1787, Charles Pinckney presented to the Federal Convention “the draft of a federal government to be agreed upon between the free and independent states of America”; that the records note simply its submission to the convention, its reference on the same day to the Committee of the Whole House, and later to the Committee of Detail; and that when John Quincy Adams in 1818 applied to Pinckney for a copy of the missing plan, he received in reply a document so strikingly similar to the draft of a constitution reported by the Committee of Detail on August 6th that it was evident one document must have been taken from the other. The conclusion has been almost universally unfavorable to Pinckney. Judge Nott in his work takes the other side, and in an elaborate argument declares that the original Pinckney plan is lost to the world because it was used as “printer’s copy” by the Committee of Detail.