Say, Mr. Speaker, shall we shut the door
And keep him out, or shall we let him in
And see if we can get him out again?”
No nation will submit a really vital question involving its national life to a World Court and then keep the agreement if the decision is adverse.
Is it not then evident that the agreement of submission must itself provide exactly what vital questions shall be excluded? In other words, that the signatory powers (according to the suggestion made by Mr. Roosevelt) “shall by solemn covenant agree as to their respective rights which shall not be questioned; that they shall agree that all other questions arising between them shall be submitted to a court.”
This agreement would provide that the territory of the contracting powers should be inviolate and that it should be guaranteed absolutely its sovereign rights in certain other particulars including for instance the right to decide the terms on which immigrants should be admitted; to regulate its domestic affairs in its own way and such other questions as the contracting powers considered affected their vital interests or the vital interests of any of them. These specified questions ought not to be submitted to the court; they ought to be mutually guaranteed in advance and all matters not so specified should be subject to the jurisdiction of the international tribunal.
Here you have the jurisdiction of the court definitely laid down in the treaty creating it. Wider jurisdiction can afterward be conferred as circumstances may justify, it is to be hoped that other Hague Conferences may gradually provide a more and more extended code of international law which the court is to administer and that its jurisdiction may finally extend to all the other principal questions which are now submitted to our federal tribunals under our own constitution. But this more extensive jurisdiction would be granted (as in the case of our own Constitution) only after the federation becomes a more perfect union, and when there shall be established a sufficient sanction of its decrees.
And now we come to the most important and the most difficult branch of the subject. How can the decrees of an international court be enforced? By public opinion? By agreements of the signatory powers? Or by an international police-force which of course means an international army controlled by an international executive?
Some of us used to hope that international public opinion, while quite insufficient to-day to enforce the judgment of a World Court, might gradually grow to such strength and power that it could finally be counted on alone to give force to the decisions of this tribunal. The events of the present war have shattered to a great extent such hopes as these. After the invasions of Belgium and Luxembourg, the wrecking of Louvain, the attack on helpless Scarborough, the dropping of bombs from the air on undefended towns, the destruction of the Lusitania, the coercion of unoffending China, it is hard to say that public opinion will restrain a military power from any act whatever or will compel the performance of any duty to other nations or to mankind at large. If the world had advanced so little in the nineteen hundred years of Christianity, how long will it take in the future to induce all the great nations to do justice?
The next alternative is that the power creating this court shall agree beforehand to enforce its decrees by the joint use of their military forces against any nation which may refuse compliance. That is probably as far as the world can go to-day and yet how ineffective it may be is shown both by the past experience of the American Confederation and by the failure to observe the Hague convention and other existing treaties during the present war. Such an agreement will have the same defect as the Articles of Confederation. It can only act upon nations in their corporate capacity and not upon individuals, and there will be no central authority with either purse or sword by which to carry out its guarantees. It will be necessarily a transitory state. The treaties signed by the great powers did not protect Belgium. The Hague Convention to which every great nation was a signatory has been violated in many particulars. Our nation was a signatory to the Hague tribunal yet all these violations have not aroused us to a single act for the maintenance of the Hague Convention, nay, they did not bring out a single protest or remonstrance until our own interests or the persons or property of our citizens became involved. How far then can we trust other nations to protect each other against violations of their mutual agreements? As in the case of the single states in the American Confederation, some will do it and some will not.