A court is created as a means by which to administer justice. Without the power to compel the observance of its decrees a court is but a comedy.
If there be no supreme power, there can be no supreme court. For without a supreme power there can be no way of establishing a responsible force having vested in it the duty of compelling the observance of the decrees of a supreme tribunal.
If a Supreme Court of International Justice be established and there be created an international force to enforce the decrees thereof, the units of that force will be responsible to the nations from whom they are taken, and not to the Supreme Court, unless that Supreme Court become more than a judicial body; it must become also a supreme administrative body of the United States of the World. Enforcement of a decree is impossible unless there is unity of force back of it. If a majority be relied upon, then the majority may be found to change. Government can only prevail when the opinion of the majority becomes the accepted doctrine of the whole. Otherwise revolution.
The Supreme Court of International Justice, to be of practical use, must pass from its position of Supreme Court to Supreme Controlling body. An utopian dream, which may in the generations to come be a reality. But not for generations.
Without a supreme controlling body there must be something to substitute in moral effect. There has existed a something which has been one influence to prevent nations from being always at war, when their individual advancement was opposed.
Dread; a greater controlling power than fear.
Dread of devastation; dread of wanton destruction; dread of extermination.
War is undertaken by a weaker power only when the alternative is dread of something even greater than devastation or wanton destruction—dread of extermination.
But the dread of war has ceased to prevent war; because the horrors of war had lost their vividness.
That universal peace will some day reign supreme must be accepted by all who believe in a progressive civilization. This includes all the thinking world. If there is to be universal peace, and if it is not to come through a consolidation of all nations, which is extremely improbable, then it must come from some controlling feeling, which will in itself create the administrative branch of the Supreme Court of International Justice.