CALVO AND THE " CALVO DOCTRINE' cited the recent use of force by France against Turkey to compel the latter to pay its debts, while Fiore likewise considered the question one to be settled on the facts of each case, which might, he conceived, war rant collective intervention. It would seem that nobody will question the general proposition that the mere non payment of public debts will not warrant armed intervention. A state may be sud denly placed under extraordinary expenses which it is unable to meet, or it may have a bad monetary system which forces it to suspend payment although its natural re sources are ample, or it may be in the throes of a revolution which for the time prevents it borrowing abroad. None of these situ ations in itself, it would seem, would warrant a foreign government stepping in and com pelling payment by force. But when a government can pay, but won't, when, in short, it is guilty of bad faith, on what principle shall we say that a foreign govern ment shall not intervene as much as for wilful injury to person or property? Under the old principle that a king could do no wrong, it was impossible to sue a gov ernment without its permission, and when its permission had been gained the execu tion of any judgment against it, against its will, was of course impossible; but the principle that the king could do no wrong, rightfully interpreted, was a civil and not a political or diplomatic or international rule. Kings could do wrong to each other, and they used arms to show how grievously they felt these wrongs, and how determined they were that they should not suffer from them in the future. If, then, an injury to a private .citizen, either in his person or property, may be considered a grievance against the state itself, why may not the exercise of utter bad faith towards him in the non-payment of debts, resulting, very probably, in infinitely greater loss to him, be likewise considered an affront to the nation to which he belongs and equally be dealt vith by the armed hand? Certainly
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practice has been that way, and practice is not to be treated lightly. It would seem to be a question of fact to be dealt with accord ing to the circumstances of each case. Before leaving this narrower and so-called "Calvo Doctrine" for the broader one for which Calvo more properly stands, it may be well to say that the claims of the bond holders which the allied powers pressed were classed by them as claims of the second rank, the enforcement of which was not the primary object of their action. In the Protocols of February 13, 1903, between Venezuela and the different allied powers, it was provided that new arrangements should be entered into by the respective governments with regard to the payment of these bonds, but it was expressly provided that they were not to be paid out of the thirty per cent of the receipts of certain customs houses, as other of the claims were, and so the question of the validity of col lecting them by force never came before The Hague Tribunal. It will, however, undoubtedly come up for extended dis cussion before the Pan-American Congress which is to meet soon at Rio. The part that we have just noticed Calvo to have played in eliciting opinions from eminent European publicists, valuable as it was, would hardly warrant the attach ment of his name to the doctrine expressed in Senor Drago's note, so that, if we would find warrant for it, we are compelled to turn to his works to see if we can find enunciated there the principles which the note of the Argentine minister brought so conspicuously to public notice. If we do so turn, it is probably his treatment of the subject of intervention in the first volume of his "Le Droit International" that is most directly in point. In his treatment of that subject he first considers the practice of European nations among themselves, and then their practice towards American states, and concludes that while among themselves intervention has nearly always rested on some important
