to meet you here." Then turning to me he asked in a low voice, "Does he swear like his old father?" I denied it.

Professor Westengard's interest for the Siamese students of this country began with the sending of the first few while he was in Siam. He followed their career closely and visited them sometimes when on leave in this country. Thus Mr. Nai Aab, then a Siamese student at Harvard and for one year president of the Cosmopolitan Club of this University, received through this kind recommendation a very beautiful portrait of the late King of Siam as a gift of His Majesty to the Cosmopolitan Club of Harvard.

Last year the Siamese government was able to establish scholarships to enable successful students of Siamese law schools to come and perfect their training in American universities. Mr. Westengard, who always manifested sympathetic interest in the study of law by the Siamese students, was asked by the Minister of Justice to act as an adviser to the students sent by this scholarship. He gladly complied with the request of the Minister, and took up most carefully and individually the problems and needs of each of the young men. He corresponded with them and enjoyed the progress of even their English letter-writing.

In view of the admiration the Siamese have for his knowledge of law it is not surprising that all our law students should have a great ambition to become one of his pupils, for this qualification would be better than other recommendations they could bring back home to Siam.

The other students who do not specialize in law also receive their full share of his kind attention; they were free to come and consult him on all kinds of problems. In spite of his pressing work Mr. Westengard had time enough left to help everybody.

The greatest benefit and at the same time the greatest pleasure derived from intercourse with the Professor was to discuss with him Siamese affairs. We could not find a better opportunity to learn the history of our country than from the statement of such an eminent authority. Professor Westengard has occupied one of the highest and most confidential positions in the Siamese government. He had access to all the archives of the kingdom, and was one of the best informed about her recent history, in the latter thirteen years of which he was one of the most prominent of its makers.

With his glorious gift of clear and concise expression he rendered the tangled chains of events intelligible and simple to remember; again avoiding the monotony of one thing following another chronologically, he added much fascination to his story by making a panorama-like sketch of a vast situation; and again he would paint in the minutest details an important action in which perhaps he himself took part as the driving impulse or as a silent witness.

His comments on the situations and the people therewith connected or responsible for them were sometimes favorable, sometimes not, but always frank and fair and above all most logical.

His criticism of the Siamese government, however severe, was given in such a delicate expression that none of us could have felt hurt, although it always had the full effect upon everybody.

His judgment deserves to our mind the greatest confidence by the one fact that he was a citizen of the United States, a country politically disinterested in Siam but very friendly to her. His personal integrity and fairmindedness would exclude any kind of prejudice or misrepresentation of facts.

Mr. Westengard, keen observer as he was, understood human nature, which, he used to say, "is governed by more or less the same kinds of passions, whether Eastern or Western . . . composed of strength and weakness, greatness and selfishness." If all the people of the West had understood as well as Mr. Westengard did the nature of Oriental peoples, many grievous hours would have been avoided.

Although he shared with us the love and veneration for those who so wisely have guided our little nation through the period of adolescence, yet he was not blinded by the glory of their achievements, like the rest of us, but could give us a fairer estimate of their real worth, their human weakness and errors, but also their praiseworthy qualities. We do not feel deprived of that mysterious respect and confidence of Easterners for their great ones; on the contrary, our admiration grows with his words, because he has added a touch of the purely human to their other almost divine qualities. He showed us that those men did not do miracles, but did more: they were possessed of wonderful human resourcefulness.

The fact that Mr. Westengard did so much and so well for the happiness of Siam we could learn from everybody out there, but to hear him give account in such a modest and unassuming way

of some of the most important events of our history, shaped by his own hands, was a priceless privilege that, alas! was granted to an unworthy few, and only for such a short time.

Talking with Professor Westengard, I often felt like having discovered the quiet and crystal-clear source of the stream that made our dearly beloved soil of Siam ever so fertile, and the people who live on its banks one of the happiest in the world.

Having received all these valuable informations from his own mouth, we feel that we shall now better appreciate the great good we possess in that independent and free land of ours.

It is curious and touching, though, that we should have to travel ten thousand miles across the ocean to find through this brilliant son of America the faith and hope in our country again.

For the sake of his noble and serviceable work in Siam, as well as what he has been to us, students far from home, we venture to appeal to Professor Westengard's American friends to be persuaded not to feel so keenly the regret for his long absence during his best years; but rather to rejoice in being able to give, through this one of your most brilliant countrymen, so much strength and happiness to a small and friendly people.

A Siamese Student,

On behalf of all the Siamese students.

IT

was singular that Mr. Westengard should have returned to the Law School to become Bemis Professor of International Law, in the fall of the year 1915, at the precise time when events were beginning both to disclose and to increase the practical importance of the law of nations. The world had suddenly found that the regulation of international conduct was, for the time being, a great deal more exigent than the regulation of individual relations; and, accordingly, the study of international law was greatly developing everywhere, even in that most utilitarian of educational institutions, the Law School. A relatively large number of men took Mr. Westengard's course, and when he came, in 1916, to teach Admiralty, a number elected that course also.

It was in the work of these courses, and of the graduate course in war problems, that Mr. Westengard's heart really lay, I think. He taught property and torts well, and he was interested in them both; but I am sure that he had not, for either of them, the keen enthusiasm that a delicate question of international law, or a vivid, picturesque, and frequently intricate question of admiralty would promptly arouse in him. He was a master of the technical reasoning required for the problems (often such dry ones) of the common law; but he preferred those fascinating questions whose solution sometimes took one back to the laws of Oléron, the "Black Book of the Admiralty," or the "De Jure Belli et Pacis" of Hugo de Groot; upon the answer to which might rest the action of a nation; and in whose determination heavy and inextricable cords of policy so often pulled one way and another. The law governing the rights and duties of neutrals, for instance, was to Mr. Westengard peculiarly vital: he once said (speaking of the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries), "My heart bleeds for the poor neutrals!"

As has been said, Mr. Westengard returned to the Law School, after a most honorable and successful career in Siam (during the course of which that country had achieved the fullest measure of independent sovereignty), at a fortunate time. He brought to his new duties not only much experience in diplomatic practice and in the administration of international law, but also wide learning,

sound judgment, and a certain quality of intellectual candor and courage which contrasted oddly with his habitual caution. He could neither be forced nor manoeuvered into taking a position, however safe and sound it might seem, until he had convinced himself that it was, not probably, but surely, so. But once he had convinced himself of this, he did not hesitate to express an opinion which others, and those the greatest of authorities, might not share. Thus, when the Supreme Court affirmed the District Court's decision in the celebrated case of The Appam, Mr. Westengard, after giving the opinion of the court more consideration than the writer of the opinion appeared to have given to the case, did not hesitate to say (without going into other serious questions presented by the decision), that he wished the court could have felt free to explain, at a little more length, its reasons for making so distinct an addition to what had been, for more than a century, the settled jurisdiction of neutral courts of admiralty.

Mr. Westengard came back to the Law School at a fortunate time, but he had only a short period in which to make a record of his presence. He must have wished, when he began to teach international law, to turn out, as the finished product of his courses, men whose diligence would make the library of the Marquis de Olivart an asset to the nation, men who, by reason of the intensive training of the case system, would become, not publicists who wrote upon international law, but real international lawyers. This, in a small measure only, he may have been permitted to do. But he did. succeed in imbuing his pupils with a realization of the inherent fallacy of inter arma leges silent, with a belief that the highest national service is the establishment of international law, and with a deep personal affection for himself.

DEPARTMENT OF STATE,

WASHINGTON, D. C.

November 4, 1918.

John Raeburn Green.