as it does an exhaustive résumé of judicial decisions, rulings of the executive, and adjudications of international tribunals-said:

"Whatever may be the conclusive force of judgments of naturalization under the municipal laws of the country in which they are granted, international tribunals, such as this Commission, have claimed and exercised the right to determine for themselves the citizenship of claimants from all the facts presented."

In this case the Commission were convinced that the claimant "had not resided " in the United States for the continued term of five years nor for any considerable portion thereof prior to the date on which a naturalization certificate was granted to him; that the facts necessary to give the court jurisdiction did not exist, and therefore that the certificate of naturalization was improperly granted. The claim was dismissed. Ralston's Report, 38. See, also, numerous cases in which international claims commissions have declined to recognize judgments of naturalization as conclusive, in 3 Moore's International Arbitrations, 2583 to 2655.

(E.) Spanish Treaty Claims Commission (1905).

In the case of Rita L. Ruiz et al. v. The United States, which came before the Spanish Treaty Claims Commission, established pursuant to the treaty of 1898 between the United States and Spain, under the Act of March 3, 1901,* the defendant, in its answer to the peti

*The 7th Article of the Treaty reads as follows:

"The United States and Spain mutually relinquish all claims for indemnity, national and individual, of every kind, of either Government, or of its citizens or subjects, against the other Government, that may have arisen since the beginning of the late insurrection in Cuba and prior to the exchange of ratifications of the present treaty, including all claims for indemnity for the cost of the war. The United States will adjudicate and settle the claims of its citizens against Spain relinquished in this article."

It is provided in the first section of the organic Act that it shall be

tion of the plaintiffs, who claimed as the widow and children of Ricardo Ruiz, asserted that the naturalization of said Ricardo Ruiz, if obtained at all, was procured by false and fraudulent representations as to residence in the United States immediately preceding his application, and by the procuring of an affidavit to the same effect from a witness called by him, and that the claimants ought not to maintain their action.

The claimants demurred to the answer on the ground that the certificate of naturalization which defendant sought to impeach was a judgment of a court having competent jurisdiction and not subject to impeachment or review by the Commission.

Upon the demurrer oral arguments were made and briefs were filed, not only by counsel on both sides but by numerous attorneys for other claimants before the Commission.

As preliminary to the question of the conclusiveness. of the certificate of naturalization, counsel discussed at great length the question as to whether the Commission was a municipal court or an international tribunal, and it was urged that the Commission was a court of the United States and not an international tribunal, and therefore that it must give full faith and credit to the judgments of all other courts, state or Federal, and must impute absolute verity and conclusiveness to a certificate of naturalization.

In passing on the preliminary question, the Commision said: "In a strictly technical sense the Commission is a national court, but in a broader sense is also international. In a very unique sense it is intimately related to both. the duty of the Commission and that "it shall have jurisdiction to receive, examine and adjudicate all claims of citizens of the United States against Spain which the United States agreed to adjudicate and settle by the 7th Article of the Treaty," . . . and that the Commission "shall adjudicate said claims according to the merits of the several cases, the principles of equity, and of international law."

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If not distinctly incorporated into the Federal judiciary system, it will not be denied that the organic Act (March 3, 1901) and the amendatory Act (June 30, 1902) confer upon the Commission all the powers of a Federal court necessary to the investigation and adjudication of the claims arising under the treaty of December 10, 1898. Being the creature of an Act of Congress, it is necessarily domestic in origin, and, being constituted exclusively of individuals of one nationality, it is certainly not international in composition, and its decisions affect only the government of its creation and composition. Back of the Act of Congress which gave it life, however, we find its conception in a treaty between two nations, and thus it came into being as a domestic creature stamped with the features of internationality.

"After a close study of the act and giving to its words the broad interpretation which the generous motive behind them authorizes, we find it impossible to separate the domestic character of the Commission as derived through its origin and composition from the international character imposed upon it by the treaty, and the precise words of the Act of Congress requiring the adjudication of claims "according to the principles of international law." Other domestic tribunals, such as prize courts, for illustration, administer international law in the absence of statutory mandate, because the nature of their business requires them to apply the law of nations; but this Commission is differentiated from all other municipal courts in that it is a domestic judicial tribunal definitely required, by the statute of its creation, to administer international law wherever that law may be fairly applied. The language of the statute, 'it shall adjudicate said claims according to the merits of the several cases, the principles of equity, and of international law,' is a mandate to the Commission to apply the principles of international law in a spirit of equity to the merits of

the cases whenever there are any such principles applicable. The exact status of the Commission, therefore, in jurisprudence, whether domestic or international, is by no means so important a question as the one of its powers. What can it do, rather than what we may call it, is the question of vital interest and consequence.

"If, by the act of its creation, admittedly domestic, it is required to do the very things for which international tribunals are established, it must be assumed that the Commission, as an equity tribunal, will endeavor to apply the principles of international law to the several cases as they arise. Relief can not be expected, therefore, in a case that is without merits-the first essential stipulation of the statute-and a case can not be meritorious that is dishonest or founded upon fraud. A case may, however, develop merits and yet this tribunal can not rightly adjudicate the same, in the light of the treaty and the Act of Congress, if it falls within the principles of international law, without applying them just as a mixed tribunal should do.

"Congress in its wisdom apprehended and unquestionably appreciated the difficulties in the way of adjudicating the various classes of claims by a tribunal restricted in its operation to the settled rules of law, and consequently decided to clothe it with greater power and more discretion than are properly exercised by the ordinary courts of law. It was not alone because the Government had solemnly assumed, but because it desired to pay all the valid claims of its citizens against Spain, that Congress created a tribunal with equitable powers so elastic that no complexity of facts or circumstances could or should prevent it from rendering such an award as the merits of the claim, the principles of justice and of international law require. The purpose of Congress in enacting this beneficial statute could not be better expressed

than in the impressive words of Chief Justice Waite in Freylinghuysen v. Key (110 U. S. 63):

"No technical rules of pleading, as applied in municipal courts, ought ever to be allowed to stand in the way of the national power to do what is right under all circumstances.'

"Finally, on the question as to the character of this Commission, the argument that it is only a domestic tribunal limited in some unexplained way in its powers as compared with an international tribunal, because, under certain conditions, the Supreme Court can review a case pending before it, is not a conclusive proposition. It will hardly be denied that the district courts of the United States are domestic tribunals, and yet Mr. Justice Story, in the case of the Adeline (9 Cranch, 244), speaking of district courts sitting as courts of prize, said:

"In the prize courts, in an especial manner, the allegations, the briefs, and the proceedings are in general modeled upon the civil law, with such additions and alterations as the practice of nations and the rights of belligerents and neutrals inevitably impose. A court of prize is emphatically a court of nations, and it takes neither its character nor its rules from the mere municipal regulations of any country.'

"It is no answer to say that this was spoken with reference to a prize court, because a district court of the United States, when sitting in prize cases, is no less domestic in its creation and composition than when sitting in bankruptcy, and appeals lie to the Supreme Court from a court of prize, which Justice Story says is 'emphatically a court of nations,' under precisely the same conditions as from a court of bankruptcy. Here we see the Supreme Court calling a purely municipal court 'court of nations.'

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