Page:Harvard Law Review Volume 32.djvu/862

826 826 HARVARD LAW REVIEW I. Lack of power in the league to prevent nations from making war without resorting to its tribunals, or from disregarding their decrees. II. Difl&culty in getting a fair trial. III. Lack of principles on which to decide disputes. rV. The impossibility of submitting what are commonly called questions of "honor or vital interest." Among the many plans for a league, some have attributed to it power both to compel its members to submit their disputes, and to enforce obedience to the decisions of the tribunals. Others have attempted only to give the league the former power, leaving the enforcement of the decisions to public opinion or the volun- tary intervention of other nations. Others again do not authorize the use of military strength in any case, but rely on the operation of moral and economic forces. The critics of these plans argue that no league can stop war unless it wields an overwhelming physical force, and that under none of these schemes would the league prove able to do so. If the power to enforce decrees were given in theory, it could not, they say, be exercised in fact. But here a glance at the history of legal institutions is instructive. Most of us live in surroundings so far removed from the primitive that it is hard for us to realize that courts of law flourished, and dealt with a multitude of cases in a manner satisfactory to the people, when their power of compelhng obedience was so imper- fect as sometimes to touch the vanishing point.^ In many early legal systems the court had little or no power either of obHging the parties to submit to its jurisdiction, or of enforcing the acceptance of its decrees; and whatever the powers attributed to the court, they were frequently defied with success, not only by evasion, but by force of arms. To prevent immediate bloodshed, by starting some sort of liti- gation as a substitute, and then to put pressure on the parties to law at the present day. They are both examples of inchoate law, in process of emerging from the state of mere custom or ethical sentiment, and not yet fully efifective. W. J. Brown, Austinian Theory or Law, § 157. Gray, Nature and Sources of the Law, §§ 285, 287.
 * The condition of all law in primitive communities resembled that of international