violation of which may be a cause of war) "as that power which is charged with the execution of the laws of which treaties make a part. . . .as that power, which is charged with the command and application of the public force."
With additional force it might be said, that the executive is as much the executor as the interpreter of treaties: that if, by virtue of the first character, it is to judge of the obligations of treaties, it is, by virtue of the second, equally authorized to carry those obligations into effect. Should there occur, for example, a casus federis, claiming a military co-operation of the United States, and a military force should happen to be under the command of the executive, it must have the same right, as executor of public treaties, to employ the public force, as it has in quality of interpreter of public treaties to decide whether it ought to be employed.
The case of a treaty of peace would be an auxiliary to comments of this sort: it is a condition annexed to every treaty that an infraction even of an important article, on one side, extinguishes the obligations on the other: and the immediate consequence of a dissolution of a treaty of peace is a restoration of a state of war. If the executive is
"to decide on the obligation of the nation with regard to foreign nations". . . ."to pronounce the existing condition (in the sense annexed by the writer) of the nation with regard to them; and to admonish the citizens of their obligations and duties as founded upon that condition of things". . . ."to judge what are the reciprocal rights and obligations of the United States, and of all and each of the powers at war:". . . .
add, that if the executive moreover possesses all powers relating to war not strictly within the power to declare war, which any pupil of political casuistry could distinguish from a mere relapse into a war, that had been declared: with this store of materials and the example given of the use to be made of them, would it be difficult to fabricate a power in the executive to plunge the nation into war, whenever a treaty of peace might happen to be infringed?
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