Notes on Sovereignty: From the Standpoint of the State and of the World (1921)

Sovereignty, as used in constitutional and in international law, may be considered a technical word or expression, and therefore within the province of the student or the scholar. The extent, however, to which sovereignty has been, and still is, discussed in reference to international organization takes it from the exclusive domain of the student or the scholar and obliges the layman to become familiar with its origin and nature. It has become a question of the day. We should, therefore, be grateful to Mr. Lansing, who has allowed his Notes on Sovereignty to be issued in handy form, where the student and the scholar, as well as the layman, may read and ponder them without being obliged to consult The American Journal of International Law, in which three of the four papers originally appeared, or the Proceedings of the American Political Science Association, in which the fourth was printed for the first time. We must educate our masters, as The Right Honorable Robert Lowe is reported to have said in Parliament, on the extension of suffrage by the Second Reform Bill. We must, indeed, educate our masters, when every man and woman possesses the right of suffrage, and the power to influence the foreign policy of these United States. These Notes on Sovereignty, less than a hundred pages, are calculated to do this very thing, and it is to be hoped that in their present form they will reach a larger circle of readers than in the technical periodicals in which they first saw the light of day. James Brown Scott Director of the Division of International Law