No, it is The Hague Conventions to which we must look.  The first convention (1899) contained no rules forbidding belligerents from entering neutral territory.  In the second conference it was thought desirable to formulate such rules, because it was felt that in war belligerents are at liberty to do what is not expressly forbidden.  At the request of France, therefore, a new set of rules was suggested, to which Great Britain and Belgium offered valuable amendments.  The rules were finally accepted, and are today parts of international law.  They read; “Article I. The territory of neutral powers is inviolable.  Article II.  Belligerents are forbidden to move troops or convoys of either munitions of war or supplies across the territory of a neutral power.”

These articles, together with the whole convention called “Rights and duties of neutral powers and persons in case of war on land,” have been ratified and therefore accepted as law by the United States of America, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia and other minor powers.  Great Britain experienced a change of heart, and, although her own delegates had moved these articles, she refused to ratify them, when she ratified most of the other conventions on Nov. 27, 1909. (A table showing the ratifications of conventions has been published by The World Peace Foundation, Boston.)

The Case of Belgium.

Since Great Britain did not accept these articles as law, she was not bound by them, for the principle of The Hague Conferences is that a nation is bound only by those laws which it accepts.  The remarkable fact, therefore, appears that the only one of the big nations which had refused to accept these articles, and which, therefore, might have moved her troops across a neutral country and have claimed that she could do so with a clear conscience because she broke no law which was binding on her, was Great Britain.  And the world now sees the spectacle of Great Britain claiming to have gone to war because another power did what she herself could have done, according to her own interpretation, with impunity.  Japan has broken the international law by infringing the neutrality of China, but Great Britain can claim that she did not break a law by doing exactly what Japan did.

It is not asserted here that the citizens of Great Britain are not absolutely sincere in their belief of the causes which have allied them with the Russians and the Japanese, and the Indians and the Zouaves, and the negroes and the French and the Belgians against Germany.  Their Government, however, should have known that the presumption of insincerity exists when one charges against others a crime which one would have felt at liberty to commit one’s self.  Yet, more, the British Government knew better than anybody else that Germany had not even committed this crime; for, according to all laws of justice, no person or nation can claim the inviolability of a neutral when he has committed “hostile acts against a belligerent, or acts in favor of a belligerent.”  (Article XVII. of The Hague Conference of 1907.)