the office being to all intents and purposes a sinecure; it is usually held by the prime minister of the day. Indeed from 1783 to 1885 it was invariably so held, but in the latter year there was a departure from the practice, and again in 1887, 1891 and 1895. The junior lords of the treasury are also political rather than financial officers, acting as assistant whips in the House of Commons. There are two joint secretaries to the treasury, one of whom, the patronage secretary, is merely a political officer, acting as chief whip; the other is termed financial secretary and is the chancellor of the exchequer's chief assistant. All the above officers are members of the House of Commons and of the government. The salaries of the first lord of the treasury and of the chancellor of the exchequer are, £5000 per annum; of the joint secretaries £2000 per annum each; of three of the junior lords £1000 per annum each, the other junior lords being unpaid. The vast bulk of the work of the treasury department is performed by the permanent staff, at whose head is the permanent secretary and auditor of the civil list, with a salary of £2500 per annum. The chancellor of the exchequer (see Ministry), as finance minister of the Crown, is the officer who is responsible to parliament for the carrying out of the business of the treasury. He performs practically the ancient duties of under-treasurer and presents the annual budget of revenue and expenditure.
The treasury department of the United States is responsible for the finances of the government and the control of the currency. Its genesis was a treasury office of accounts established in 1776 for the purpose of examining and auditing accounts. In 1779 it was reorganized, but was abolished in 1781, on the election of Robert Morris as superintendent of finances, and in 1789 the present executive department of the treasury was established by act of Congress. Its scope is more varied and complex than that of any other United States government department. It is presided over by a secretary, who is a member of the cabinet and has a salary of $12,000 per annum. He is assisted by three assistant secretaries, two of them having salaries of $5000 and the third a salary of $4500. The treasury department looks after the revenue administration of the United States, and has for this purpose a customs service division and an internal revenue division. There is also the division of the treasury, in the strictest sense of the word; bureaus of auditing and accounting, of currency and of banking and certain miscellaneous bureaus, as the life-saving service, the public health and marine hospital service, the supervising architect and the bureau of engraving and printing.
TREATIES. A treaty is a contract between two or more states;
The Latin term “tractatus,” and its derivatives, though of
occasional occurrence in this sense from the 13th century
onwards, only began to be commonly so employed, in lieu of
the older technical terms “convention publica,” or “foedus,”
from the end of the 17th century. In the language of modern
diplomacy the term “treaty” is restricted to the more important
international agreements, especially to those which are the
work of a congress; while agreements dealing with subordinate
questions are described by the more general term “convention.”
The present article will disregard this distinction.
The making and the observance of treaties is necessarily a very early phenomenon in the history of civilization, and the theory of treaties was one of the first departments of international law to attract attention. Treaties are recorded on the monuments of Egypt and Assyria; they occur in the Old Testament Scriptures; and questions arising under συνθῆκαι and foedera occupy much space in the Greek and Roman historians.[1]
Treaties have been classified on many principles, of which it will suffice to mention the more important. A “ personal treaty, ” having reference to dynastic interests, is contrasted with a “real treaty, ” which binds the nation irrespectively of constitutional changes; treaties creating outstanding obligations are opposed to “transitory conventions,” e.g. Classification. for cession of territory, recognition of independence, and the like, which operate irrevocably once for all, leaving nothing more to be done by the contracting parties; and treaties in the nature of a definite transaction (Rechtsgeschäft) are opposed to those which aim at establishing a general rule of conduct (Rechtssatz). With reference to their objects, treaties may perhaps be conveniently classified as (1) political, including treaties of peace, of alliance, of cession, of boundary, for creation of international servitude's, of neutralization, of guarantee, for the submission of a controversy to arbitration; (2) commercial, including consular and fishery conventions, and slave trade and navigation treaties; (3) Confederations for special social objects, such as the Zollverein, the Latin monetary union, and the still wider unions with reference to posts, telegraphs, submarine cables and weights and measures; (4) relating to criminal justice, e.g. to extradition and arrest of fugitive seamen; (5) relating to civil justice, e.g. to the protection of trade-mark and copyright, to the execution of foreign judgments, to the reception of evidence, and to actions by and against foreigners; (6) promulgating written rules of international law, upon topics previously governed, if at all, only by unwritten custom, with reference e.g. to the peaceful settlement of international disputes, or to the conduct of warfare.
It must be remarked that it is not always possible to assign a treaty wholly to one or other of the above classes, since many treaties contain in combination clauses referable to several of them.
The analogy between treaty-making and legislation is striking when a congress agrees upon general principles which are afterwards accepted by a large number of states, as, for instance, in the case of the Geneva conventions for improving the treatment of the wounded. Many political treaties containing “transitory conventions,” with reference to recognition, boundary or cession, become, as it were, the title-deeds of the nations to which they relate.[2] But the closest analogy of a treaty is to a contract in private law.
The making of a valid treaty implies several requisites. (1) It must be made between competent parties, i.e. sovereign states. A “concordat,” to which the pope, as a spiritual authority, is one of the parties, is therefore not a treaty, nor is a convention between a state Requisites. and an individual, nor a convention between the rulers of two states with reference to their private affairs. Semi-sovereign states, such as San Marino or Egypt, may make conventions upon topics within their limited competence. It was formally alleged that an infidel state could not be a party to a treaty. The question where the treaty-making power resides in a given state is answered by the municipal law of that state. In Great Britain it resides in the executive (see the parliamentary debates upon the cession of Heligoland in 1890); sometimes, however, it is shared for all purposes, as in the United States, or for certain purposes only, as in many countries of the European continent, by the legislature, or by a branch of it. (2) There must be an expression of agreement. This is not (as in private law) rendered voidable by duress; e.g. the cession of a province, though extorted by overwhelming force, is nevertheless unimpeachable. Duress to the individual negotiator would, however, vitiate the effect of his signature. (3) From the nature of the case, the agreement of states, other than those the government of which is autocratic, must be signified by means of agents, whose authority is either express, as in the case of plenipotentiaries, or implied, as in the case of e.g. military and naval commanders, for matters, such as truces, capitulations and cartels, which are necessarily confided to their discretion. When an agent acts in excess of his implied authority, he is said to make no treaty, but a mere “sponsion,” which, unless adopted by his government, does not bind it, e.g. the affair of the Caudine Forks
- ↑ For the celebrated treaty of 509 B.C. between Rome and Carthage, see Polybius iii. 22; and, on the subject generally, Barbeyrac's full but very uncritical Histoire des anciens traitéz, (1739); Muller-jochmus, Geschichte des Vzilkerrechts im Alterthum (1848); E. Egger, Etudes historiques sur les traités publics chez les grecs et chez les romains (new ed., 1866).
- ↑ Cf. Sir Edward Hertslet's very useful collections entitled: The Map of Europe by Treaty (4 vols., 1875–1891), and The Map of Africa by Treaty (2 vols., 1894).
