In the same opinion the Supreme Court calls attention to an act passed in 1798, declaring that the United States were freed and exonerated from the stipulations of previous treaties with France.  This subject was fully considered by Justice Curtis, who held, as the Supreme Court says (Page 602):  “That whilst it would always be a matter of the utmost gravity and delicacy to refuse to execute a treaty, the power to do so was a prerogative of which no nation could be deprived without deeply affecting its independence.”

We observe, therefore, that under our own ideas of international law the United States claims the right to disregard its stipulations if the interests of the country should require it.  And the same right we should concede to other nations.  Particularly to Germany in the present instance, when we find her battling for her very existence against enemies that seek to destroy her, against enemies that surround her on all sides, against enemies that do not hesitate to bring troops into the conflict from the wilds of Africa and Asia, and who do not hesitate to drag Japan into this war, causing her to disregard Chinese neutrality in her effort to capture a small settlement, lawfully occupied in China by a handful of German soldiers.

In this connection I quote the British sentiment, as expressed by Gladstone regarding Belgium neutrality in the year 1870: 

But I am not able to subscribe to the doctrine of those who have held in this House, what plainly amounts to the assertion that the simple fact of the existence of a guarantee is binding to every party to it, irrespective altogether of the particular position in which it may find itself at the time when the occasion for acting on the question arises.

This shows that England herself reserved the right, whenever her interests required her to do so, to act in violation of the treaty with Belgium.  That, at least, is my understanding of Gladstone’s language.  England did not respect Danish neutrality a hundred years ago, when she destroyed the Danish fleet at Copenhagen because her interests required, and England does not now, through its Asiatic ally, and directly, respect Chinese neutrality, claiming the right primarily to consult her own interests.  Should this right, asserted by our own Supreme Court, and actually assumed by England and Japan, be denied to Germany?  Finally, I understand that The Hague Conference of 1907 drafted a convention which reads: