PROHIBITIONS FOR RECALCITRANT STATES.
In order to enforce the decrees of the international high court against any recalcitrant State an embargo on her ships and forbidding her landing at any capital might be initiated. Also there might be instituted prohibition of postal and telegraph communication, of payment of debts due to citizens, prohibition of all imports and exports and of all passenger traffic; to level special duties on goods to such State and blockade her ports. In short, an effort should be made to enforce complete nonintercourse with any recalcitrant State.
Should a State proceed to use force to go to war rather than obey the decree of the international high court all the other constituent States should make common cause against such State and enforce the order of the international high court.
THE PSYCHOLOGICAL MOMENT FOR PREVENTING WAR IS SOON AFTER WAR.
If an absolute agreement among leading nations of the world never to resort to war could be obtained at the outset all other questions could be settled more justly and with fewer difficulties, for the consciousness that the supreme question was out of the way would relieve the psychological tension and afford opportunity for a more calm and careful consideration and adjudication of all other matters in dispute. It would be like the consciousness of the lawyer, when having lost his case in all other courts is content to let the United States Supreme Court settle it forever. This is due to the psychological power of the radiation of justice from the top downward.
Such an absolute and final agreement never to resort to war can be best accomplished right after the war, when all are sick of war and the very thought of it causes the suffering, wounded, and bleeding people to turn their heads significantly away with a profound instinctive feeling, crying out that anything is better than to go back to the old régime. In such a state of mind mutual concessions are much easier to make than later on.
The psychological moment to prevent such suffering of the masses from ever occurring again is soon after the war. It is a sad comment that the number and untold suffering of millions of human beings seem to have been required for the nationalistic spirit of Europe to be willing to follow international humanitarian ideas toward establishing permanent peace in the world.
THE HAGUE RULES ONLY SUGGESTIONS.
The diplomats who wrote the rules at The Hague Convention knew well that they might be more or less disregarded; they were only suggestions. As war assumes the right to kill human beings, what rights, then, have the victims left over that are worth mentioning? As to what way they are killed there is little use of considering, probably the quicker the better, for there is less suffering. If prisoners must starve, it is a mercy to shoot them. To regulate murder of human beings is more or less humbug. The thing to do is to try to abolish international anarchy and slaughter forever, and to accomplish this the egotism, selfishness, and narrowness of nations must be so modified that they are willing to make the necessary sacrifice.
If the reader believes the general ideas set forth in this study, let him or her aid the writer in a practical way and send a contribution to help circulate these ideas, not only in English and other languages but in other countries as well as the United States.