Third—Periodical conferences should be held between the members of the League for the declaration of principles of international law. This is really a provision for something in the nature of legislative action by the nations concerned in respect to international law. The principles of international law are based upon custom between nations established by actual practice, by their recognition in treaties and by the consensus of great law writers. Undoubtedly the function of an Arbitral Court established as proposed in the first of the above suggestions would lead to a good deal of valuable judge-made international law. But that would not cover the whole field. Something in the nature of legislation on the subject would be a valuable supplement to existing international law. It would be one of the very admirable results of such a League of Peace that the scope of international law could be enlarged in this way. Mr. Justice Holmes, in the case of Missouri vs. Illinois, to which I have already referred, points out that the Supreme Court in passing on questions between the States and in laying down the principles of international law that ought to govern in controversies between them should not and can not make itself a legislature. But in a League of Peace there is no limit to the power of international conferences of the members in such a quasi-legislative course, except the limit of the wise and the practical.
Fourth—The fourth suggestion is one that brings in the idea of force. In the League proposed, all members are to agree that if any one member violates its obligation and begins war against any other member, without submitting its cause for war to the Arbitral Court if it is a justiciable question, or to the Commission of Conciliation if it is otherwise, all the members of the League should unite to defend the member attacked against a war waged in breach of plighted faith. It is to be observed that this does not involve the members of the League in an obligation to enforce the judgment of the Court or the recommendation of the Commission of Conciliation. It only furnishes the instrumentality of force to prevent attack without submission. It is believed it is more practical than to attempt to enforce judgments after the hearing. One reason is that the failure to submit to one of the two tribunals the threatening cause of war for the consideration of one or the other is a fact easily ascertained, and concerning which there can be no dispute, and it is a palpable violation of the obligation of the member. It is wiser not to attempt too much. The required submission and the delay incident thereto will in most cases lead to acquiescence in the judgment of the Court or in the recommendation of the Commission of Conciliation. The threat of force against plainly unjust war—for that is what is involved in the provision—will have a most salutary deterrent effect. I am aware that membership in this League would involve on the part of the United States an obligation to take part in European and Asiatic wars, it may be, and that in this respect it would be a departure from the traditional policy of the United States in avoiding entangling alliances with European or Asiatic countries. But I conceive that the interest of the United States in the close relations it has of a business and social character with the other countries of the world—much closer now than ever before—would justify it, if such a League could be formed, in running the risk that there might be of such a war in making more probable the securing of the inestimable boon of peace to the world that now seems so far away.
THE CLEVELAND CONGRESS
BY
JOHN WESLEY HILL
This is a topsy-turvy world to-day. Thinking men—and women too, for that matter, stand aghast at the harking backward to barbarism. In one fell swoop, as it were, from a plane of ostensible civilization the greater part of the civilized universe has been plunged into a veritable maelstrom; an indescribable cataclysm of heinous warfare and matchless bestiality. Danté in his wildest dreams painted no such Inferno and the end blacker in perspective than the background of a Doré painting is not yet!
Out of the chaos what may come is a matter of rife speculation for future historians. But that there is a sovereign remedy for the avoidance and future recurrence of such world racking evils of carnal pillage, wholesale murder and strife, is a fact that cannot be gainsaid and the keynote for that panacea was sounded at Cleveland on three gala days, this last May, when the first great World Court Congress was held with an enthusiasm and earnestness almost unprecedented in the history of such assemblages in this country.
This whole land was just awakening from a commercial and industrial somnolence, unrecorded except in days of panic and war at home, when the Congress was convened on May 12th and the progenitors of the great movement had many misgivings as to their ability to induce the staid business man of this country to lay aside his duties even for the movement and attend.
Marts and ’changes had been closed; industries idle and nearly the whole business world at a standstill for months past when the call for the Congress was sounded and it was thought by some of its warmest advocates that so many difficulties beset the way that but a meagre gathering could be assembled. To the astonishment and gratification of the big men back of the movement just the reverse was true and it is doubtful if a more representative body of Americans ever assembled under one roof. A one time President, Senators of the State and Nation, members of Congress, great Captains of Industry, Educationalists, Bankers, Brokers, Ministers of the Gospel, diplomats and men of conspicuous prominence in nearly every walk in life thronged the immense armory in which the Congress was in session for three days, and the initial movement for a great World Court begun.
Some idea of the intense interest in the all-important prospect may be had from the statement that no less than twenty-eight governors of various states of the Union signed the call for the Congress. More than one thousand delegates answered the roll call, representing national and civic life in all its different branches. Some of the more conspicuously prominent men present were ex-President William Howard Taft, John Hays Hammond, Judge Alton B. Parker, Henry Clews, Theodore Marburg, Rabbi Joseph Silverman, James Brown Scott, of the Carnegie Peace Foundation, Denys P. Myers, of the World Peace Foundation, Hon. Bainbridge Colby, of New York, Dr. Francis E. Clark, Dr. Samuel T. Dutton, Hon. Henry Lane Wilson, William Dudley Foulke, Senator Atlee Pomerene of Ohio, Harry A. Garfield, son of the late President Garfield, Thomas Raeburn White, Bascom Little, Herbert S. Houston, Vice-President of Doubleday, Page & Co., Thomas B. Warren, Senator Warren G. Harding, Emerson McMillin, and numerous others.