t. Rules of universal international law must
certainly rest on unanimity. It is postulated in the equality of states
that no state can be bound by any law to which it has not given its
consent. But there is naught to prevent a legislative conference from
framing rules of general international law for those states which assent
to it and leaving the dissentient states out of consideration. If the
inclusion in a single convention of all the points under discussion be
avoided, and if the method, adopted at the second Peace Conference, of
dividing the topics of discussion among as many smaller conventions as
possible be followed, it will always be found possible to secure the
support of the greater number of states for the regulation of any given
matter. In no long time thereafter the dissentient states will give in
their adherence to these conventions, either in their existing or some
amended form. Attention will then be paid also to the consolidation of
several smaller laws in a single more comprehensive statute. The nature
of the case and the conditions of international life call for
concessions without which no progress would be practicable. The course
of international legislation hitherto shows unmistakably that the
trodden path is the right path. And it must be emphasized that it is
open to a state to assent to an act of international legislation
although some one or other provision thereof be unacceptable to it. In
such a case the assent of the state in question is given with a
reservation as regards the particular article of the Act, so that it is
in no wise bound by that article. Numerous instances of this could be
adduced: thus, at the Hague Conference of 1907 Germany withheld her
assent to some of the proposed rules of land war, and England to certain
articles in Conventions V and XIII.

[Sidenote: International laws which are limited in point of time.]

40. So also, the difficulty is not insuperable as regards the other
point, namely, that international enactments when once in existence
cannot be repealed or amended save by a unanimous resolution of the
participant states. Here, too, the analogy between municipal and
international legislation must not be pushed too far. Municipal
legislation can at any time be annulled or altered by the sovereign
law-maker; but international legislation, for want of a sovereign over
sovereign states, is not open to such treatment. Here there is a way
out, which was in fact ado